


The Serendipity Gospels

by urbanAnchorite (t_ZM)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Black Romance, Blood, F/F, F/M, Illustrated, M/M, Mind Control, Multi, Nudity, Pale Romance, Red Romance, Torture, Trinitystuck
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-02-08
Updated: 2013-01-11
Packaged: 2017-10-30 19:18:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 130,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/335176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/t_ZM/pseuds/urbanAnchorite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"And then I saw a new Alternia, for the old Alternia had passed away." -- <i>St. Troll John Cusack</i></p><p>How the Empire knelt to a clown, a mutant and a lawyer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. PROLOGUE

**PROLOGUE.**

  


**TRANSCRIPT OF TEREZI PYROPE'S EXECUTION**

**X:** Legislacerator Sandrz, Marjet. The culling team is in the process of confirming all witnesses. All subjugglators have been cordoned off for viewing and prayer. His Honorable Tyranny is restless, but making no movements. All witnesses have now been confirmed. The legislacerator is now in the process of advising all witnesses that we will now proceed with the Imperial-sanctioned execution of Lady Terezi Pyrope. Legislacerative cull team alpha?

**Y:** Ready.

**X:** The culling team is now readying the ceremonial gallows for use. The culling team is now escorting Lady Pyrope to the noose. She is walking, unassisted, to the noose, and she is now checking the knot. One of the culling team members is offering her a hood. She has rejected the hood. She is now placing her head in the noose as the culling team secures the gallows. The gallows are secure at this point in time.

The rope is secure at this point in time. His Honorable Tyranny is restive again. His Honorable Tyranny... His Honorable Tyranny just ate a subjugglator.

**Y:** Is this a problem?

**X:** The other subjugglators don’t seem to care.

**Y:** Doubt the clown even noticed. Continue.

**X:** The gallows are secure. The noose is secure. The condemned still has her head within the noose, and her glasses have been removed. No sign of movement or resistance from the condemned. The head legislacerator stands ready.

**Z:** Let the court know I’ve been signed to oath to witness the execution of Lady Pyrope. Your Tyrannicism, is there any reason this execution shouldn’t be carried out?

**HT:** _[incoherent screeching]_

**Z:** Thank you.

**X:** The head legislacerator has offered the condemned opportunity for prayer and produced a mirthful priest. The condemned has declined. Noise from the subjugglator witnesses. The legislacerators are demanding order. Order is restored. The culling team has secured the lever of the gallows at this point in time.

**Z:** Lady Terezi Pyrope, fourteenth Grand Highblood of the Mirthful Church, First Laughsassin and legislacerative member of the Cruellest Bar. You stand guilty of high treason, levying war, unsanctioned cahoots, inciting hemocaste hatred and the blasphemous murder of the thirteenth Grand Highblood, Lord Gamzee Makara. For this direct offense against Her Imperious Condescension our Empress, you are to be hanged by the throatstem until dead.

**HT:** _[incoherent screeching]_

**X:** Due to your status his Honorable Tyranny will afford you the opportunity to record your last words.

**TP:** This smells like a very nice knot. Highly professional.

**Z:** Anything else?

**TP:** Let me die.

**Z:** Proceed to carry out the official order of the Court.

**X:** The culling team has pulled the lever.

  


  


  



	2. ACT ONE, CHAPTER ONE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With thanks to wardrobe mistress, typography editor, ideas team and ball girl, **m-azing** (by name and nature).

**ACT ONE:**

_Justice Lies Awake_

**CHAPTER ONE**

* * *

  


  


Your name is **TEREZI PYROPE** , and you have been accepted to the **LEGISLACERATIVE DIVISION OF TROLL JUDICIARY**. Welcome to the most exciting time of your life!

The acceptance letter reads as follows:

_**SYMBOLHIGHT:** PYROPE  
 **HATCH NAME:** TEREZI  
 **ID:** #10D-0314  
 **BLOOD CASTE:** TEAL  
 **CULLING STATUS:** HEALTHY_

_To: PYROPE, TEREZI_

_Regarding: PLACEMENT_

_Your score on the entrance exam was 109%, with bonus marks in CRIMINAL LAW and CALCULATED CRUELTY. You have been labelled ACCEPTABLE to join the noble ranks of the LEGISLACERATORS. You will begin at the lowest rank of CRUDE SOLICITEEN._

_Please present yourself for inspection at THE HIC EXECUTOR in TWO DAYS COME FLEETDOCK. You must bring your STRIFE SPECIBUS, LEGAL TEXTS AND AN IMPERIAL-APPROVED MODUS. Any other equipment must check out under your caste allowance and approved list._

***** DO NOT BRING ANY DOOMSDAY MACHINES *** THE FLEET HAS ITS OWN *****

_If your LUSUS is attending as a COMPANION/MOUNT/WAR MACHINE, please fill out LUSUS FORM #941B-A. If you have a MOIRAIL who has been rated HEALTHY, please fill out MOIRAIL FORM #562CC-D._

_If there have been any mistakes regarding name, placement or ID, PLEASE GO THROW YOURSELF INTO THE NEAREST FIRE AS THE BUREAUCRETINS DO NOT HAVE TIME TO DEAL WITH JUVENILES ASKING RIDICULOUS QUESTIONS AS TO THEIR PROCESS_

_Extra notes:_

_As you know, all LEGISLACERATORS are paired with SUBJUGGLATORS as part of IMPERIAL LAW. Please check the board to discover identification of your partner. If you wish to kill your partner, DO SO NOW, as unlawful death of your partner IN-FLEET will result in a court martial and is punishable by death._

_Regards,  
THE PLACETORMENT COMMITTEE_  


  


* * *

  


\-- gallowsCalibrator [GC] began trolling twinArmageddons [TA]! --

GC: L3G1SL4C3R4TOR UN1T!! >:D > :D >:D  
TA: computraiitoriial cyber engiineeriing.  
GC: WOOO!!  
TA: oh my god, a2 though we’re 2urprii2ed.  
GC: TROLOLOLOLOLO GOOD PO1NT >:D

\-- gallowsCalibrator [GC] ceased trolling twinArmageddons [TA]! --  
  


* * *

  


\-- gallowsCalibrator [GC] began trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG]! --

GC: W3LL >:?  
CG: THRESHECUTIONER CORPS.  
CG: BOO.  
CG: FUCKING.  
CG: YAH.  
CG: TONIGHT I AM AN UNRIGHTEOUS GOD, AND THERE IS A LUSTROUS CARPET ROLLED OUT UPON WHICH I MAY SHIT MYSELF LAVISHLY ONWARDS TO DESTINY.  
CG: TONIGHT YOU MAY GIVE YOURSELF BUTTOCKSPRAIN POINTING YOUR ASS SKYWARD AS YOU KISS MY SHOE AND  
CG: OH MY GOD, WHAT THE FUCK AM I DOING.  
CG: WHY AM I DOING THIS. WHAT THE FUCK AM I DOING.  
GC: BUT THR3SH3CUT1ON3R 1S WH4T YOU W4NT3D, DUMMY >:?  
CG: I’M GOING TO GO PUKE AGAIN.

\-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] ceased trolling gallowsCalibrator [GC]! --  


  


* * *

  


\-- arachnidsGrip [AG] began trolling gallowsCalibrator [GC]! --

AG: Covertraumatic Operations!!!!!!!!  
AG: I mean, whatever, right? Yawn. I 8et you got the legislacer8ors or some such.  
AG: For a Serket, it’s all kind of a drag! Sure, accept me into your adequ8 spy agency. That’ll do. It wasn’t like there was anything that really called to me.  
GC: WHY 4R3 YOU T4LK1NG TO M3  
GC: 1 R34LLY DONT C4R3  
AG: Come on!!!!!!!! God. I can’t 8elieve you’re still this petty over what happened when we were young. This is a time to turn over a new leaf. Right?  
AG: 8esides, it’s not like you 8locked me.  
GC: YOU K1LL3D 4 FR13ND OF M1N3 1N COLD BLOOD, WHO W4S 4NOTH3R FR13NDS MO1R41L  
GC: YOU TOSS3D 4NOTH3R OFF 4 CL1FF C4US1NG H1S SP1N3 TO CR4CK L1K3 4N 3SP3C14LLY DRY TW1G  
GC: YOU PROV3D YOURS3LF COMPL3T3LY UNWORTHY OF TRUST OR R3L14NC3  
GC: 4LSO YOU Bl1ND3D M3 L3TS NOT FORG3T TH4T ON3  
GC: 1F 1 D1DNT BLOCK YOU 1T W4S 4N OV3RS1GHT >:P  
AG: I guess I have to say it again.  
AG: Terezi!  
AG: I am re8lly, re8lly s8rry a8out 8ll th8se th8ngs.  
AG: Super sorry! Like, it actually hurt me too. I’ve got a lot of regr8s.  
AG: I have defin8ly suffered.  
AG: And hey, without me, Nitram wouldn’t have gotten his silly ass into the Cavalreapers, which he totally just did!  
GC: 1 TH1NK YOU M34N W1THOUT YOUR W31RD SM3LLY SW34TY BLU3B3RRY ROBOT1CS FR13ND >:[  
AG: Same diff! I 8usted my ass getting all of Pupa’s quack8easts in a row. You know. As a ‘I regret that your spine 8roke when I pushed you off that cliff’ thing.  
AG: So... I’ve learned my lesson, right? I’m really a good person now.  
GC: 1 H4V3 TOLD YOU TH1S B3FOR3  
GC: 1 W1LL T3LL YOU 1T 4G41N  
GC: TH3 JURY 1S 4GR33D!  
GC: TH3 ST4T3 OF B31NG ‘SORRY’ DO3S NOT 4CTU4LLY R3QU1R3 OTH3RS TO FORG1V3 YOU, N31TH3R DO3S 1T M4K3 YOU 4 GOOD P3RSON  
GC: SOM3T1M3S YOU H4V3 TO 4CC3PT TH4T TH1NGS YOU DO M4Y H4V3 CONS3QU3NC3S FOR TH3 R3ST OF YOUR L1F3  
AG: Another Pyrope lecture!  
AG: Just imagine me clapping slowly, then rising from my seat as all my claps 8ecome 8ig and profound.  
AG: Not!!!!!!!!  
AG: I’m not a kid any more! This shit is ridiculous. You seriously think you’re my schoolfeeder, and you have to give me lesson after stupid dum8 lesson for the sake of my ‘education.’  
AG: So what, that’s it? I fucked up, and I can’t do anything about it? You let me humili8 myself apologizing and it doesn’t get me anywhere? How is that fair????????  
GC: 1T 1S 3NT1R3LY F41R 4ND JUST  
GC: HOW SOM3ON3 F33LS 1S TH3 L4ST DOM41N UNTOUCH3D BY TH3 COURTS!  
GC: YOU C4N N3V3R D1CT4T3 SOM3ON3 3LS3S F33L1NGS  
GC: 1T 1S TH3 L4ST CL34N L3G4L FRONT13R 4ND TH3 GLORY OF QU4DR4NT L4W >:]  
AG: You can’t just leave me!  
GC: VR1SK4  
AG: Whatever. No. Reverse that. A8ort it.  
AG: I 8n’t Eridan, this is just the principle of the thing. You can do whateeeeeeever you want. I mean, I was just reaching out for old time’s sake. Scourge Sisters. As grown-ups now. I mean, who knows what’s going to happen out on the Fleet? ::::\  
AG: 8ut we can have manners, ok? Have some class.  
GC: YOU DO NOT G3T TO T4LK 4BOUT CL4SS! >:[  
AG: Topic chaaaaaaaange! I had a look at your partner 8oard, you know.  
AG: Lol. I can’t decide whether you lucked out or not.  
AG: Gamzee Makara????????  
GC: OH MY GOD S3R1OUSLY  
GC: VR1SK4 4R3 YOU K1DD1NG  
AG: Nope! Go sniff. Pupa’s stupid stoner, right? The one who does really 8ad rap?  
AG: Hahahahahahahaha! You two are going to make one hell of a team!!!!!!!!  
GC: OH MY GOD, YOU W3R3NT K1DD1NG  
GC: Y333333333333S! >:D  
AG: Wait. You’re excited?  
AG: I once saw this guy eat a handful of sand 8ecause he thought it looked crunchy.  
GC: G4MZ33 1S 4DOR4BL3! H3 M4Y B3 H1GH ON3 HUNDR3D P3RC3NT OF TH3 T1M3 4ND DUMB3R TH4N 4 BOX OF CL4WS BUT H3 1S V3RY SW33T  
GC: H3 4ND 1 W1LL H4V3 FUN 4ND FUN 1S 1MPORT4NT! >:]  
GC: H3 W1LL NOT B3 H4RD TO M4N4G3  
GC: 1 M34N SUR3 H3 W1LL NOT L1ST3N TO 4 WORD 4NYON3 S4YS 4ND 1 W1LL H4V3 TO K33P H1M OUT OF TROUBL3 THROUGH D1STR4CT1ON W1TH SH1NY OBJ3CTS  
GC: BUT UNL1K3 TH3 3NT1R3 R3ST OF TH3 GOD4WFUL SUBJUGGL4TOR CHURCH H3 1S NOT 4 TOT4L CR33P, JUST STUP1D  
GC: 4LSO H1S N4M3 1S H1L4R1OUS TO SP3LL WH1CH 1S 4 B1G CONC3RN  
GC: 1 H4V3 TO GO T4LK TO H1M! >:D  
AG: Sure! Fine. I have like a million people talking to me aaaaaaaanyway.  
AG: You were just a 8lip on the radar.  
GC: VR1SK4  
AG: Yeah?  
GC: W1TH TH3 COV3RTR4UM4T1CS  
GC: DONT G3T 1N OV3R YOUR H34D  
GC: DONT G3T 4NYON3 3LS3 1N OV3R TH31R H34D  
GC: TH1S 1SNT 4 G4M3 4NY MOR3

\-- gallowsCalibrator [GC] ceased trolling arachnidsGrip [AG]! --

AG: Oh, 8ite me!  


  


* * *

  


\-- gallowsCalibrator [GC] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC]! --

GC: CONGR4TUL4T1ONS >:] >:] >:]  
GC: 1 4M SURE TH1S 1S TH3 B3ST N1GHT OF YOUR L1TTL3 L1F3  
TC: AwWwW, gIrL, iT'S SuReLy nIcE YoU Up aNd sAyInG ThAt, I'M AlL LiKe... YeAh!  
TC: SuRe Is, mY MoSt sIgHtLeSs oF WiCkEd sIsTeRs.  
GC: 4R3 YOU 3XC1T3D???  
TC: WeLl hElL YeS!  
TC: ExCiTeMeNt's aLl hAnDeD Me mY AsS AnD ToLd mE ThIs iS ThE WaY We'rE Up aNd rOlLiNg fRoM NoW On!  
TC: HoNk HoNk! :o)  
GC: M3 TOO! TH1S SM3LLS L1K3 4N 4DV3NTUR3 FOR US BOTH!  
TC: WhOa WaIt  
TC: HaNg iT A SeC  
TC: AbOuT wHaT ArE We bOtH GeTtInG OuR ExCiTaBlE UpPeR OvEr AgAiN  
GC: S1111111111GN  
GC: G4MZ33 YOU DOOFUS  
GC: 1 4M YOUR OFF1C14L L3G1SL4C3R4T1V3 P4RTN3R FOR TH3 PURPOS3S OF K33P1NG L4W 4ND ORD3R B3TW33N TH3 SUBJUGGL4TOR CHURCH 4ND TH3 CRU3LL3ST B4R  
TC: WhOa, SiS  
TC: ThIs lEtTeR'S GeTtInG ItS InFoRm oN TeLlInG Me i'm a fUcKiNg sUbJuGgLaToR!  
TC: ShIt, I DoN'T EvEn kNoW HoW To cOnTeMpLaTe tHiS GoDdAmN HaPpEnStAnCe!  
GC: OH MY GOD G4MZ33  
GC: DO YOU S3R1OUSLY N3V3R CH3CK FOR 3M41LS T3LL1NG YOU WH3TH3R YOU G3T TO L1V3 OR NOT  
GC: OH MY GOD TH1S 1S MY L1F3 FROM NOW ON >:[  
TC: HeY, sIgHtLeSs sIsTeR, i dOn't fUlLy gEt wHy yOu'rE AlL ThE BuTtEr iN My GrUbLoAf NoW, bUt i'm gOnNa eNjOy iT :o)  
TC: I WiLl bE YoUr mOtHeRfUcKiN EyEs  
TC: AnD I WiLl bE YoUr mOtHeRfUcKiN NoSe  
TC: WaIt, yOuR HoNk sNoRt sTiLl wOrKs  
TC: BuT ToGeThEr wE WiLl bE A FlAt-oUt sTrAiGhT-Up bItChTiTs sCiNtIlLaTiNg...  
TC: .....  
TC: ........  
GC: M1R4CL3 >:? >:? >:?  
TC: Aw yEaH GiRl yOu gOt iT!  
TC: SeNd tHoSe QuEsTiOn NoOdLeS hOmE!  
GC: H3H3H3H3  
GC: OH G4MZ33  
GC: 1 PROM1S3 YOU TH4T 1 W1LL B3 TH3 P4N OF TH1S OUTF1T 4ND TH4T YOU W1LL B3  
GC: ...TH3 G4MZ33 >:]  
GC: FROM NOW ON, L34V3 3V3RYTH1NG TO M3  
TC: My wIcKeD SiS, cOnSiDeR AlL ThE ShIt i cAn't eVeN GeT My nUg fOcUsEd oN MoThErFuCkInG LeFt tO YoUr sTiCkY LiTtLe pAwS :o)  
GC: SCOR3!  


  


* * *

On the night the ships land you say goodbye to Sollux and Karkat, and you make your separate ways towards adulthood. They are berthed together aboard the _Conquerer_ \-- Karkat jittery and Sollux remote as the day Aradia died -- and they leave without you having ever met either face-to-sniffer. The _Destructinator_ and the _Conquerer_ take the shock infantry, the _Imperial Might_ all the surgicallous wannabes and officers to train, and the _Alternian Sun_ special ops; you think of Vriska.

And for you is the _Executor_ , staffed half by painted priests and half by the Cruellest Bar. This makes for a very weird experience. The boarding line is all indigobloods jostling low blues, trolls who span mainly aquamarine to turquoise, with neither side liking each other very much. Some little subjugglator starts calling your line _cyanosed_ , and then _cyanosed_ is catcalled up and down accompanied by mass honkage and ugly jeers. The tealbloods are all unhappy and wet with Faygo spray. Everything is adult and mature between you all. It’s a grapey-huckleberry chlorine mint clusterfuck, with a nasty Moon Mist chaser.

You have no idea where Gamzee is. He seems to have no idea either. You’ve been messaging him because you were pretty sure he would have slept through Fleetdown otherwise, but the only information he can give you is that he is in “A bIg MoThErFuCkInG lInE,” which you are hoping means he is not in one for the _Destructinator_. The bureaucretins are very harsh on trolls at the wrong assembly place. You are waiting with a groaning modus and Pyralsprite tucked comfortingly under your arm despite your nearly eight sweeps, which has already meant that the other tealbloods do not really want to talk to you. Sucks to be them; you’re amazing. One of the subjugglators in the line opposite found out you were blind and took offense to it, so you had to drub him senseless with your cane. All normal assembly shenanigans.

Church law and Imperial law share a strange quadrant. In your opinion, the law of the Mirthful Church is a bloated parasite serving the needs of highbloods reinforcing the structure of blood caste, but then again such a military needs such military police. The church considers it a great honour for young legislacerators to be attached to a young Messiah. The young legislacerators are not so honoured.

In fact, you can hear some already muttering behind you:

“ -- can’t _wait_ until I get promoted, give me a sweep and I’ll make Neophyte -- ”

“ -- you think that’s bad, I saw my partner and I think they’re on drugs -- ”

“I _met_ mine! She _offered_ me drugs!”

“At least yours _likes you_ \-- ”

And so on. You cannot hear any coherent conversation from the subjugglator line, but this is because unlike Gamzee Makara, most of these are sneering highbloods assured of their assorted chucklevoodoos. Their smiles are sharp and wicked, and their smiles do not always reach their eyes. They saunter as though filled with slightly uncomfortable secrets, and they certainly tend to look at you all as though you are one step beneath their contempt. They have ground contempt into the floor with their shoes like fresh barkbeast plop. You’re below that.

Maybe it’s all meant to teach a legislacerator modesty. Maybe it is meant to teach a subjugglator patience. You know the lesson you are going to learn: the lesson about _completely lucking out_ and receiving the universe's only silly soporific clown.

The line crawls like slimebeasts pailing. Tempers rise. On other ships, violent trolls would be berthed with their moirail and consideration taken into streamlining their careers, which is the reason that somewhere out there Nepeta Leijon is waiting to become a ruffiannihilator. You had been surprisingly upset where she had been surprisingly zen, calm about the idea that she would follow her gross sweat-stained moirail to the front lines. There aren't any Nepeta Leijons here. Indigobloods seem to not have moirails as a strange exception to the rule, though whether it's a point of pride or a cultural marker you're not sure. It’s not all true across the board: you saw one with a seadweller up ahead in the line, but that is because a seadweller can be with anyone and go anywhere a seadweller wants.

You know the only person to care about Gamzee’s welfare was Karkat, who made grumbles and mumbles at you about going easy on Gamzee, how he was a stupid dumb douche whose handling only needed to be 'bloody and severe' rather than 'unrelentingly violent', and you had laughed. Mr. Vantas has a soft spot for everybody.

By the time you're assembled on board you're all tired, hungry and gently traumatised, which is just the way they like you. Nobody is fatally wounded; points for your cohort. Not all cohorts will be able to say the same. Legislacerator officers are milling around in their neat, crisp uniforms, all smelling tidy and freshly-pressed as though they're due for a court hearing. Mirthful chaplains are walking around too, iron-backed and reeking of pasty facepaint. You smell dark hangings and old scratches on the walls, two dots and a round _O_ for a nose; the briefing-rooms must double for prayer-rooms around here. While you're all crammed the same stuffy room, bumping elbows and boots, they wardrobify your uniforms en masse. Everyone flickers. There are a couple grunts of complaint, but you don't mind one bit. This is because red is the legislacerative trim colour in honour of its most famous member; everything is a happy cherry scarlet shitpocalypse and you go into the briefing happy as a bivalve, cheered by your delicious new vest and your delicious new boots.

The commencement speech is much what you had anticipated. You do not go into anything without doing your homework first. On the dais you smell the neat row of buttery yellow pips that indicate the Brigadier-General Advocate, highest-ranked legislacerator onboard; on the dais you smell the rainbow-stained chitin and wild hair of the Ecstatic Exarch, highest authority here of the Church. You are able to pick up any number of interesting things. Even here the legislacerators and the highbloods mostly separate themselves; one group arrayed behind their Exarch, the other behind their Advocate. Only a few legislacerator-messianic pairs march around your cohort, cowing all noisemakers into silence.

This is the first time you have been in the presence of genuine adults. You feel a twinge of smallness, of insubstantiality. It dissipates like a thin curl of smoke when you think that this is just what they want you to feel, and that also there are greater forces at work here than a bunch of officers' exasperation with the new generation. For instance: the subjugglator priests look right through you, their grape-ringed eyes settling only on your highblood brethren.

"I am Brigadier-General Advocate Parlet," says the head legislacerator, and there is a smatter of clapping before people realise they are not meant to clap.

Brigadier-General Advocate Parlet is handsome and compact, neatly-boned, a square pair of glasses obscuring her eyes. You can't sniff from here, but her irises will be in the upper echelons of copper blue.

"Your time aboard the _Executor_ will be short, but it will feel like the longest sweep of your lives. I don't need to tell you that your paths will be exacting, as one element the Cruellest Bar shares with the Mirthful Church is its emphasis on competence. We also respect the chain of command. You will treat your ranked superiors with due deference, no matter your blood caste compared with theirs; as you make your way through the ranks, you will gain that same deference due you.

"Through your training, this is also a time for you to familiarise yourself not only with your chosen profession, but the profession that sits alongside it. The relationship between the Church and the Bar is upheld both legally and as a sacred rite. It traces its roots all the way back to our Grand Highblood XII's work with the Neophyte Redglare. You will work to uphold both institutions, not merely your own. When the time comes you may enter a different branch of law or ecumenical work and no longer require a partner, but for now you function as both military police and clergy. You are one and the same. You and your counterpart must move as one, work as one, uphold the legal system and the holy law as one.

"Exactitude. Unity. Devotion. Uphold these and uphold these swiftly, because there is no quarter given for the foolish."

Nobody claps this time, at least.

High on the dais, the Brigadier-General's place is taken by her opposite. The Ecstatic Exarch and the Advocate are as different as the two Alternian moons. Liquorice and purple are the order for any subjugglator, carried out here in great wine-dark splotches and tarry spikes. The Exarch smells old and sticky. She is untidy and wild as the Advocate was neat and brushed, hair a crunchy halo behind her. When her oculars sweep over you all you feel a thrill of fear start right from your toes to travel up to your gullet, cold and slippery. You feel your saline ducts water. You feel the hair right at the nape of your neck stick up. Through the fear you are a little irritated; you had not expected to be so woefully open to psychic miasma.

Neither does the Exarch use the volume grub. "Look at all your fine little faces," she calls out, "so aglow with goddamn promise and virtue, a full cohort of young things ready to behold all their tiny eyes can see! Look at you young sweet chucklefucks, your pans free of brains and your hearts dry as mummified shit chutes. Do you think yourselves worthy of this path? Do you think you are fine and faithful enough to carry out this miraculous work? You egotistical little shits, you should grovel on your bellies in front of the whole ship's complement and be sorry we have to behold your malformed faces! Who amongst you believes in miracles?"

There is mass honking. It sounds like a bunch of hummingbeasts trapped in a tunnel. "I say to you, you believe in shit you haven't even seen!" continues the Exarch. "I say, continue onwards and you will see things that make your palpebral flaps fall out of your fucking heads! I will see you all become believers and rulemakers, so bow your _hideous heads_ , brethren, and I will lead you in prayer."

You don’t know it. The highbloods all seem to. You're not surprised; the Mirthfuls seem to approach religion with the idea that they will do it enough for everyone else, and nobody has to know the fine details. The Exarch calls out the names of the Sinister and the Just, of righteousness and evil. She calls out, " _Magnets,_ " and there is a ragged chant of reply, " _How do they even god damn work?"_

When it is over all the highbloods break out in a mass _WHOOP, WHOOP_ , and the rest of the legislacerator cohort joins in too: a far more embarrassed sussurrus of whoops, muttered through pursed chutes. You decide to say _whoop, whoop!_ as loud as you can, for entertainment purposes and also as a social experiment. Indigo and tealbloods alike give you dirty looks. This is going to be a very, very, very long sweep, and you are determined to make it even longer for everyone else.

There are a couple of little announcements after that, but you don’t care to listen. As everyone streams out of the briefing hall they are already busy tapping at their tablets or complaining about room assignments. You squeeze past a curve-horned Subjugglator saying, “Starboard? I’ll be right next to the officers, there goes my fucking social life,” and yet another trainee bemoaning, “Midships -- party _central.”_ To get through the burbling crowd you have to say _blind! Out of the way, please!_ and whack a few shins with your cane before people start giving you a wider berth, and from there you go to solve your last mystery.

TC: WeLl HeY gIrL!  
TC: I'lL bE sTaNdiNG bY tHe WiNdOw WiTh aLl tHe sPaCe bEhInD iT!  
GC: G4MZ33  
GC: 4LL OF TH3S3 PORTHOL3S H4V3 SP4C3 B3H1ND TH3M  
GC: W3 4R3 1N SP4C3  
TC: ShIt, GoOd PoInT  
TC: LeT mE gEt mY sPeCiFiCiTiEs On  
TC: oKaY, loOk fOr tHe SpAcE sTaR wInDoW wHaT's GoT mE wAiTiNg. :o)

Sometimes if you did not know better, you would assume he was fucking with you.

The crowd thins out the farther you get from the briefing-rooms, down the walkway. You do not need to have ever seen him before to recognise him. Gamzee Makara is a whole head taller than you. Gamzee Makara has long, long limbs and swell-jointed fingers, each ending in a grimy claw. He is carved angles, a blunt jaw, a mouthhole full of pearly vanilla fangs. The first deep breath you take of him tells you the slouch of his shoulder, the arch of each rib beneath his fresh subjugglator shirt, the high slender sweep of each horn. His hair is unbrushed. His facepaint is smeared. When he smiles at you it is a long, lazy, wondering thing, sort of langorous, broad palms spread upwards all _oh, daaamn_ like you are a marvel. He moves gelatinously, each gesture carefully telegraphed.

He looks a complete weirdo. You approve.

"Well, just up and look at _you_ ," he says.

“I can’t look, Gamzee,” you say. “I am blind. _Duhr hurhhh.”_

“Aw, that’s me, Terecita,” says your subjugglator partner, and he ruffles your hair a little too hard. “Dunno but I’m forgetful as all fuck.”

  


You are certain this will be the start to a beautiful partnership!

A couple of stewards lead you all to the trainees’ mess. You can see it is beginning to dawn on some what Fleet life actually means; gone are the nice warm meals served by a tender lusus at their own culinary-block table, replaced by the reality of a big impersonal mess hall and a wide array of boiling protein vats. Nobody is given the opportunity to linger on their food, either, as you are sent in a score at a time to fill bowls, secure seats, and bolt down your dinner before the next wave begins. You have never had a lusus whose home-cooked grubloaf you could pine for, so to you the process is novel. Gamzee appears completely delighted with the wide array of slurries to choose from. You recall he was not the home-cooked grubloaf type either.

That first night, you are all too bewildered and tired to talk much. This does not infringe on you as nobody wants to talk to you much anyway. Between your brutal drubbing-cane and now Gamzee, the other members of your cohort are more than happy to not have to engage you in conversation. You don’t quite mind. You are even a little relieved to have your Mr. Sticky Grape by your side, openly funnelling sopor into his dinner slop as other trainees stare. Rumour shall travel quickly here: Gamzee will soon be known as the one highblood who puts sopor into his nutrient pastes.

 _Do you **have** to?_ you’d asked. _Gotta flow with what’s natural, wicked sis_ , he’d said. You can’t twinge that much. You were already at a social disadvantage! You will just be known as the legislacerator partnered to the highblood who puts sopor in his nutrient pastes.

When your still-warm seats are being claimed by others grateful to park their gluteals and devour their dinner, you follow another weary group of trainees to your residential combs. Both you and Gamzee are berthed in the dismal bowels of the ship, allocated rooms about the size of your ablution block back home. You will miss the air and the space and your tree most of all. At least your tiny room is yours and yours alone; giving subjugglator-legislacerative pairs the same room would be a gross approximation of moirallegiance! The few moirail pairs among you have been given bigger rooms in the real residential cells, lucky enough to get rewarded for their romantic commitment.

You bid farewell to Gamzee, who is already more distracted with the prospect of a new room than he is with you. Yours is its replica and nothing to troll home about: a recuperacoon, a little walled gaper, a scouring basin for nondrinkable cleansing fluids. The universe’s tiniest ablution trap. A desk with a breathtakingly uncomfortable chair, a dock to plug a husktop into. You’ll unpack your modus tomorrow. Right now you skin your clothes off and feel very weird, easing into an unfamiliar bath of sopor slime that smells comfortless and strange, and after a moment you find yourself very carefully reaching for your tablet.

There’s only one person on.

\-- gallowsCalibrator [GC] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG]! --

AG: What do you think a8out it?  
GC: 1M NOT SUR3

\-- gallowsCalibrator [GC] ceased trolling arachnidsGrip [AG]! --

You fall dead asleep.  


  


* * *

  


Life begins its strange, regimented march onwards. Both yours and Gamzee’s schedules fill immediately. Here’s what they look like: you share _Introduction To Law_ and _Introduction To Religious Law,_ but you’re alone in _Contract Law_ and _Court Law._ Subjugglators don’t take _Argument Construction_ or _Logic,_ but they attend _Culling Law_ two units a week. Gamzee takes _Scripture_ the rest of the time, though what he’s learning in Scripture you have no idea because his notes are doodles of cockeyed hoofbeasts.

He really is a trouble. It’s true that subjugglator discipline is different to legislacerative. Their first law seems to be that of _might_ making _right,_ for instance, and they hold their bizarre clown shibboleths to all be true, like how books and science are not to be trusted -- this makes for a slippery quadrant pail between you all, as some jokester in your cohort cracked. (The subjugglator group are rightfully, regretfully contemptuous of legislacerative humour.) But Gamzee is bad at even his own subjugglator disciplines. He is the most singularly unambitious boy you have ever met. Never an answer ready in class; “Damned if I know, sir,” is his usual response, accompanied by titters. Humiliation has no effect! Punishment doesn’t touch sides. Your own exhortations are met with bewilderment. “Aw, _girl,”_ he’ll say sadly, then doodle on his homework.

When you are waiting in your trainee pinny for use of the crimnasium, you often see him sparring with other luckless subjugglators. Fighting Gamzee is like water fighting oil. He dodges each blow his frustrated opponents try to land, weaving out the way in surprise as though he has forgotten why someone is trying to strike him, all to the din of a priest bawling: “ _Makara!_ Lay a _hit,_ you useless, good-for-nothing shit-sack -- ”

“They don’t teach it the right way none,” he tells you later.

It’s such a funny thing for Gamzee to say that you drop the book you’re licking and look at him, really _look_ at him. It is the first time you ever see him looking somewhat discontent. His chin is in one broad hand, smearing the facepaint willy-nilly, and he looks far-off. “They don’t teach it the right way,” he repeats. “Look at them up and fucking thinking they make the black bits between the stars all god damn _knowable,_ Terecita. I’m like, _daaaamn, bro,_ why are you trying to trap all this revelatory shit and stick it in a cage?”

“It justifies their existence!” you say, and this makes him laugh.

In comparison, the work is one thing you find easy. You have learned the fine details of court law, contract law and even religious law long ago, obsessed with the ins-and-outs of Alternian _tortum._ You are regarded as something of a prodigy, though in your opinion anyone would be regarded as a prodigy had they bothered to open up the books and read. Even when you were blinded you figured out a way to read. The schoolfeeding officers like you; even Comedic Chaplain Chazot in _Introduction to Religious Law_ likes you; once the Brigadier-General sat in on _Argument Construction_ and had a little chat with you afterwards, personally, about Martynelian logic. It is rather nice. Nobody lifts a finger in your direction. Of course, it’s not the legislacerative wont to break trainee faces, but you have never even been cuffed by any of the highblood priests.

The result to your ego is extreme puffiness. You can’t help it. The other legislacerators see you as competition, the other subjugglators don’t care, and your partner-in-crime is pliable but distracted by bright noises and sudden sounds. If it wasn’t for you he wouldn’t get to class, let alone hand in any work! You may not get walloped by the officers, but Gamzee is regularly beaten like a gong and yawns all the way through it. He would drive you to drink if you had any.

The reason for his distraction becomes obvious early:

“Karkat,” he’d said to you at dinner, mid-glop. You were chasing around the last traces of delightfully pink chitin paste with a spoon. “Karkat’s not answering any of my shout-outs. Tavbro’s gone all silent too, motherfuckin’ bad coincidences piling up on my doorstep and looking up all lumpy at me.”

“Just like the food here, am I right?”

Gamzee laughed; you two gave each other a high-five, which you were wont to indulge him in. A high-five cost nothing. It was good for mutual morale. You two had also hit upon a special handshake, and it could be relied upon to irritate every single trainee in a corridor if implemented. Nobody else particularly wanted to know you, but it would have been a blow to your pride to not look as though you were having fun in the bargain. Gamzee is highly amenable to this plan! You two have even rapped, and it was execrable. At times you think you and he are quite close to attachment.

But you’d added, “He won’t be for a while. Basic training, Mr. Makara. They’ll be stationed on some moon and get rolled in barbed wire for half a season, shitting rations.”

That clouded his open, blunt features over. “Aw,” he’d said, disappointed. “That’s a -- that’s a point-blank downer, mother of fuck.”

“Are you sweet on Tavros?”

His expression did not go dreamy. It went intense. There was a very particular expression on his face when he looked at you, as though the question hadn’t quite parsed and as though you were on the verge of a steep precipice. That was fine; you hadn’t been asking for confirmation of anything but what he might look like and say, asked about his flushcrush. Tavros being honey for highbloods was an old joke. “Ain’t Tavros Nitram just the _sweetest fucking_ thing?”

You’d changed tack. “But are you sweet on Karkat?”

“Don’t scrub, wicked sister, he’s my best bro.”

“Incorrect! Technically not an answer!”

Gamzee tapped the side of his nose, intending cunning but just leaving a smear of food on one nostril. “A singbeast up and told me _you_ got filled with one red shiny miracle for Karkat, little lawyer.”

That startled you. When you looked at him he was guileless as a grub, smiling, as though the idea of you having feelings for Karkat -- and you cursed yourself for not being remotely as subtle as you thought you’d been, if _Gamzee Makara_ had guessed, or if Karkat had said something, and you weren’t quite sure Karkat had said anything at all -- if Karkat felt -- your feelings for Karkat were complex and unexpectedly grave. Being red for Karkat when you were six sweeps had been delightful and easy. Red for Karkat at nearly eight was like urinating on an electrified fence.

“A little singbeast,” you’d said tartly, trying to recover, “is not a reliable witness.”

He had thought this was apparently the funniest thing he’d ever heard and laughed for a whole minute solid, patting your shoulder, though this may have also been because he was straining sopor into his food again.

You considered sopor.

All of you rise early, your own self after five hours’ sleep. You all attend evening Mass hiding flap-splitting yawns from the Exarch, who is notoriously unkind about what qualifies for ‘heresy’; you all dolefully chew grubflakes for breakfast, softened with a little protein milk. You never dawdle over these. You hustle off your erstwhile partner to the classroom, looking over whatever work he had done or more generally hadn’t done, prodding and moulding it into something halfway presentable before you all stand and recite the Pledge of Fearllegiance.

Gamzee is intractable in the way only a truly apathetic student can be. Sometimes he will hit upon the right answer with perfect, easy grace, and when you quiz him desperately as to his method he will answer “guessed it,” or “miracles,” or “ _honk,”_ all with pupils blown so wide you could fly a spaceship through them.

It is for him you’re called to stay afterwards in _Introduction To Law. Introduction To Law_ is now a class where your homework is used regularly as an academic model, with you nominated regularly to explain. This makes nobody love you. In fact, you think a couple of the other legislacerators are waxing a bit black! Some of the subjugglator trainees even call you _Teach,_ in a brutal fit of creativity. This nickname is the cause of much cohort mirth: _Why is Teach always schoolfeeding? Cause she misses her pupils!!!!_

Much like all other cohort humour, this joke is supremely weak and dearly beloved by all. Only someone very insecure would have been unhappy at it. If your nose ever fills with the papery scent of blank, schooled faces after you’d gone up to lecture, if you only ever hear the smattering of very forced applause, you of course never think anything of it.

But it is not unusual for you to be called back to talk after _Introduction To Law._ What _is_ unusual is that, this time -- as you chatter away brightly to the teacher about pre-Spacefaring caste law -- the Brigadier-General Advocate is waiting for you in the schoolfeeder’s office. The schoolfeeder shuts the door, and you twang a hasty salute in the General’s general direction.

“Sir!”

“This is only a brief chat,” says General Parlet. “About your future. Sit.”

Unsure of such deference, it takes you a moment to obey. You hook your cane into a chair, ease yourself into it and make your feet touch the floor, knowing you will be hard-pressed to keep them still otherwise. You like the legislacerative head of the _Executor,_ and indeed she is urbane and even-handed, but she has no time for fidgets. “Excellent points made regarding civil defense laws still enshrined in current law. Even fully-fledged legislacerators miss the contexts of those, unless they’re abhorristorians on the side.”

You don’t quite know what to say to that. “I enjoy contexts.”

“Good. Do you know how the pre-sectional examinations are marked, preliminary to your first judicial assignments?”

This is, to you, an odd question. “Marks can be gained up to three hundred!” you say. “The emphasis is on written examination, but around ten percent will come from the physical examination and drills, although that seems to be skewed a little to fifteen percent for the subjugglator students -- ”

“Correct, Soliciteen. Also, not the full picture.” Brigadier-General Parlet steeples her fingers; she looks at you over steel-framed glasses, contemplative. “We use both marks -- that of the legislacerator, and that of the subjugglator -- when giving assignments. Consider the end mark to be out of six hundred. Marks under 70% are counted as those pairs needing remedial training, generally at the front lines.”

You goggle. She adds impassively, “Or we send them as legal advisors to the set of Troll _Crime Scene: Investigation.”_

“But that’s -- ”

“Unnecessarily harsh? Do you know what Subjugglator Gamzee Makara wrote for his last mock Culling Law exam?” The Brigadier-General rustles through some papers, and draws one out with the air of someone presenting a dead squeakbeast. “It could be seen as excessive bravery or excessive stupidity. Note his introduction: ‘why do we even got to cull a guy,’ and the meat of his argument, which appears to be the letters “G,” “T,” and a heart. I don’t suppose -- ”

“That T does _not refer to me!”_

“Well, that solves one shipping dilemma,” she says, and leans back in her chair. You catch sight of the rest of his appalling mock exam: sentences of disjointed ramble, and suddenly -- _courts of first instance ain’t got no jurisdiction over what’s basically up and high court province, how’s THAT for bullshit_ before going on mystifyingly with, _honk._ “Subjugglator Makara is of a certain disposition.”

“Sir, he’s kind. And he is placid.”

“He’s lazy,” says the Brigadier-General.

You couldn’t call Gamzee _lazy;_ lazy implies that Gamzee is not doing his level best already, which is to label the paper as his and know he should be writing something on it. In your mind, he makes considerable effort. “Subjugglator Makara can be left to me, sir,” you say. “Surely the technicals should be the province of the legislacerator? Gamzee Makara’s loyalty shouldn’t be in question! He is solid backup!”

“Clown cultists are not briefcases, recruit,” she says drily. “We do not carry them.”

“But -- ”

“Even you can’t score a hundred and twenty percent on an exam, Pyrope.”

Those copper-blue irises are deep and clear, a beautiful oxidised green that smells like sea-salt. They are also unreadable, even to a nose. No quick dilation of the pupil nor flicker of the eyelid gives away your commanding officer’s thoughts: you wonder what she is encouraging. “Sir,” you say, “permission to speak freely. Of pedagogy.”

“Granted.”

“I’ve read the Neophytic writings,” you say. “I know the origin of the subjugglator-legislacerator pair-ups. What I would like to know is why it is still _done?_ I mean, being blunt, what good does it do a young legislacerator?”

“Kindness,” she says, without so much as a blink. “You will be helped and hampered by the Church of Mirthful Messiahs your whole professional life. A legislacerator needs to get used to the ways and means of a subjugglator as they’re still forming their practice; you don’t yet understand the purposes religious law serves in our Empire, nor how our dread Empress utilizes it. Introduce our young legislacerators to subjugglators any later in their training and we’d lose half of them to insubordination culling. Legislacerators control the method of indictment; the Church controls indictment itself. Do you understand?”

“But why do we have to fuss around fused at the hip?”

“You’ll have many a court case in your time where there’s not a single Messiah in the room,” says the General. “The most worthwhile lesson you will learn is: their reach is still present. You enjoy contexts. Where lies the schism between landdweller and seadweller?”

This is getting rather political. “Trick question. The schism between landdweller and seadweller is -- _landdweller,_ and _seadweller._ ”

“No. Or, too basic.” She leans back in her chair, taking her glasses off to shine them with her handkerchief. “The schism begins with bluebloods. Historically, there were always complex allegiances between the indigobloods and the ocean empire -- read your Yhosti, you’ll have clearance for the early works. The seadwellers have always respected the Cult, long before the unification. One of the early great Empresses bestowed upon them a very gracious accolade. Do you know what it was?”

You do not. “Only bluebloods were good enough for seadwellers’ slaves. But to the Cult was given the tealbloods, as scribes, as notaries -- as whatever they wished.” General Parlet spreads her hands a bit wryly: “And here we remain.”

There is a thoughtful pause between you both. The Brigadier-General’s schoolfeeding mode melts visibly away, the implacable distance of rank walled between you. “And that is all I have to say. Gamzee Makara is not about to drop dead of his own volition. A student like you will be spared Troll _Crime Scene;_ at least on the planet of the slaughtering rat people you may achieve redemption. Dismissed.”

Stumbling out of the schoolfeeding office, you decide swiftly on a solution.

  


  


* * *

  


\-- twinArmageddons [TA] began trolling gallowsCalibrator [GC]! --

TA: you’d better 2tiill be aliive and kiickiing.  
TA: ii only have room for 2o much lo2t 2hiit.  
GC: SOLLUX!!!!!!!!!!  
TA: that wa2 enthu2iia2tiic.  
GC: WHY H4V3NT YOU B33N CONT4CT1NG M3  
GC: 1 4M GO1NG TO G1V3 YOU SUCH 4 DRUBB1NG! >:I >:I >:I  
GC: YOU DONT T4LK TO M3 FOR W33KS 4ND TH3N 1 C4NT F1ND YOU ON TH3 CONQU3RORS COMP4NY L1ST1NGS 4ND K4RK4T 1S UNR34CH4BL3 4ND 3V3RYTH1NG 1S B4S1C4LLY L4RG3 FORC3FUL H3LP1NGS OF CHOL3RB34R D14HRR34  
TA: yeah, well.  
TA: that’2 becau2e ii wa2n’t on board.  
GC: WH4T >:?  
TA: ii went wiith the thre2hecutiioner cohort planet2iide two giive engiineeriing a22i2tance.  
TA: whiich wa2 a fuckiing deliight, let me tell you.  
TA: four week2 of mo2quiitoe2, 2hiitty 2iignal2 and no thank2 from anyone, e2peciially no thre2hecutiioner traiinee.  
GC: BUT YOUR3 4 R3CRU1T!  
GC: WHY WOULD TH3Y S3ND YOU DOWN 4S SUPPORT ST4FF??  
TA: tz.  
TA: they took one look at me and gave me my full grade.  
TA: you are now beholdiing iinformatiion 2y2tem2 engiineer offiicer captor.  
GC: OH MY GOD >:]  
GC: HOW  
GC: HOW D4R3 1 CONT4CT 4 B31NG OF SUCH MUN1F1C3NC3  
TA: fuckiing riight.  
TA: liittle more genuflectiion needed there, peon.  
GC: PL34S3 S3O C4PTOR S1R T4K3 MY HUMBL3ST 4POLOG13S 1 4M 4 LOWLY L3G1SL4C3R4TOR 4ND D1D NOT KNOW  
GC: T4K3 MY 1NS1GN14  
GC: T4K3 MY W4G3S  
GC: T4K3 MY UND3RW34R  
TA: liike hell ii wiill, iit won’t even fiit.  
TA: they made you a liieutenant legii2laceratiive advocate yet?  
GC: NO BUT ONLY B3C4US3 TH3Y D1DNT W4NT 3V3RYON3 3LS3 TO F33L B4D  
GC: WH3N D1D YOU G3T B4CK >:?  
TA: two week2 ago.  
GC: W3LL TH4T 1S N1C3 4ND 4LSO COMPL3T3LY HORR3NDOUS  
GC: YOU C4NNOT S33 MY F4C3 BUT 1T LOOKS L1K3 TH1S  
GC: >:U  
TA: ii2 that a tube on your head, or ii2 the u your mouth?  
GC: TH3 U 1S MY 3XC3SS1V3LY D1SPL34S3D FL4P!!  
GC: WHY 1SNT THR3SH3CUT1ON3R C4D3T V4NT4S R3PLY1NG TO MY M3SS4G3S >:?  
GC: 1 M34N, H3 COULD 4T L34ST H4V3 TH3 D3C3NCY TO R3PLY TO G4MZ33  
GC: 1T WOULD 3V3N B3 COOL 1F H3 H4D TH3 1ND3C3NCY TO CONT4CT ONLY M3  
GC: BUT FR4NKLY TH1NGS 4R3 4 L1TTL3 D1SM4L 4ROUND H3R3 4T TH3 MOM3NT >:\  
TA: yeah, well, here two.  
GC: R34LLY  
TA: not my 2tory two tell.  
TA: but kk’2 not goiing two be avaiilable any tiime 2oon, two you or two gz.  
TA: don’t get me wrong, ii thiink he’2 beiing a fuckiing iidiiot and not doiing him2elf any favor2.  
TA: but ii al2o thiink he i2 tryiing two leave you both out of thii2 should anythiing go wrong.  
GC: DO 1 3V3R G3T 3NL1GHT3N3D 4S TO WH4T “TH1S” 1S OR DO 1 H4V3 TO S1T H3R3 FL1CK1NG MY SNOUT  
TA: 2tart 2nout-fliickiing.  
TA: ii don’t mean two be a nooktea2e, ii am ju2t exhau2ted out of my mothergrubbiing mind and frankly ii have no idea how we even got thii2 far.  
TA: ii mean ju2t look at me, ii’ve already 2aiid 2o much they 2hould bu2t me down to fuckiing loo2eflapped diip2hiit alpha.  
TA: have you heard from vk.  
GC: VR1SK4?? NOT L4T3LY  
TA: iif you do tell her two keep her fuckiing frond out of iit.  
TA: the only rea2on ii haven’t taken her down for her 2neakiing around i2 that tv would go wiith her.  
TA: moment tv ha2 an aliibii, boom. and that’2 only for aa’2 2ake.  
TA: ii am 2urrounded by iidiiot2 and iinfantry.  
TA: (2ame diiff.)  
TA: (2ee already my engiineeriing biia2.)  
GC: W3LL YOU KNOW TH4T W4S 4N 3XC3LL3NT B1T OF V31L3D WH4T TH3 FUCK 4ND 4LSO QU1T3 4 N1C3 B1T OF P4SS1V3 4GGR3SS1ON GU1LT TR1P  
GC: 1T W4S MOR3 L1K3 GU1LT SHOR3 L34V3  
GC: LONG T3RM GU1LT S4BB4T1C4L  
GC: 1 C4N DO TH3 S4M3!  
GC: T3LL K4RK4T TH4T 1F H3 DO3SNT T3LL G4MZ33 TO P1CK UP TH3 P4C3 H3 4ND 1 4R3 GO1NG TO GO PR4CT1C3 L4W 1N 1TS R4W3ST FORM  
GC: 4T TH3 PL4N3T OF D34TH 4ND T4X3S!!!  
TA: what.  
GC: 4T PR3S3NT OUTS3T G4MZ33 1S GO1NG TO F41L OUR 3X4MS 4ND H3 4ND 1 4R3 TO4ST  
GC: 1 4M B3G1NN1NG TO SUSP3CT TH3Y W4NT M3 TO K1LL H1M  
GC: WH1CH 1S 1LL3G4L 4ND 1MMOR4L 4ND 4LSO JUST SOM3TH1NG 1 H4V3 N1L D3S1R3 TO DO  
GC: 3V3N THOUGH H3 1S B3G1NN1NG TO V3X M3 >:[  
GC: H3 1S MY FR13ND! 1 THOUGHT H3 W4S MY FR13ND!  
GC: BUT H3 WONT S4V3 H1MS3LF, 4ND TH1S 1S 4N 1NST4NC3 WH3R3 1 C4NNOT S4V3 G4MZ33 4ND MYS3LF 4LON3  
GC: SO 1 BEG1N MY W4R ON DRUGS >:[  
GC: NO MOR3 SOPOR  
GC: S4F3R COMMUN1T13S TOG3TH3R  
GC: H3 L1ST3NS TO K4RK4T FOR R34SONS TH4T 1 HOP3 K4RK4T H4S D4MN W3LL SUSP3CT3D!  
GC: H3 DO3S NOT L1ST3N TO M3, D3SP1T3 MY B3ST 3FFORTS  
GC: 4ND B4D ON3S >:I  
TA: 2low down. iit’2 not a gotta go fa2t, tz.  
TA: you’re takiing gz off 2opor?  
GC: BY TH3 T1M3 1 4M THROUGH W1TH H1M H3 W1LL B3 G1V1NG 1NSP1R1NG T4LKS 4T CHURCH FUNCT1ONS  
GC: H3LLO MY N4M3 1S G4MZ33 M4K4R4 4ND 1 H4V3 B33N CL34N FOR SW33PS NOW TH4NKS TO TH1S TWO ST3P PROGR4M  
GC: ST3P ON3, G3T YOUR T1R3L3SS 4ND GOOD LOOK1NG FR13ND T3R3Z1 TO DRUB TH3 3V3RLOV1NG FUCK OUT OF YOU UNT1L YOU 4SSOC14T3 SOPOR W1TH NOTH1NG BUT DRUB BURN  
GC: ST3P TWO, R3P34T  
GC: BUT TH4TS NOT 1MPORT4NT, WH4TS 1MPORT4NT 1S HOW W3 H4V3 TWO W33KS UNT1L JUDG3M3NT D4Y  
GC: 4ND TH3Y 4R3 GO1NG V3RY V3RY F4ST!  
TA: tz, cool iit. you are goiing a miile a miinute.  
GC: SOLLUX  
GC: DONT YOU D4R3 CYB3R P4P M3 1 HON3STLY TH1NK 1 WOULD DO 4N 4CROB4T1C D4NC3 MOV3 OFF TH3 H4NDL3 >:\  
TA: ii mean iit, cool iit, on the double. you’re lo2iing the plot. thii2 ii2n’t liike you.  
TA: call me a flamiing fuckiing hypocriite but when wa2 the la2t tiime you 2lept.  
TA: or ate?  
TA: or took a fuckiing break at all, you dumba22.  
TA: you 2ound overclocked out of your mii2erable liittle gourd and iif you were my hu2ktop ii would be defraggiing you 2o hard and 2o long you’d be coughiing up free 2pace and partiitiion2.  
TA: tz?  
TA: fuck ii am u2ele22 at thii2. ii ju2t made goddamn computer metaphor2 at you.  
TA: FUCK. II AM FUCKIING INCOHERENT.  
GC: 1 4M H3R3  
GC: 1 W1LL DO 4LL OF THOS3 TH1NGS  
GC: 3XC3PT FOR TH3 P4RT WH3R3 YOU D3FR4G M3 4S TH4T SOUNDS ODDLY S3XU4L 4ND YOU SHOULD S4V3 TH4T FOR SOM3ON3 SP3C14L  
GC: 1 4M JUST SUDD3NLY V3RY T1R3D  
GC: TH4T 1S 4LL >:|  
GC: 1 TH1NK 1 4M GO1NG TO GO NOW BUT  
GC: SOLLUX PL34S3 K33P 1N CONT4CT  
GC: 4ND PL34S3 T3LL K4RK4T  
GC: TH4T 1F H3 DO3S NOT P1CK UP H1S P4L3 SL4CK 1 W1LL F1ND SOM3ON3 3LS3 TO!!!!!  
GC: 4ND GOD H3LP H1M 1F TH4T SOM3ON3 1S M3  
TA: tz. waiit.

\-- gallowsCalibrator [GC] ceased trolling twinArmageddons [TA]! --

TA: 2hiit.

  



	3. ACT ONE, CHAPTER TWO

**ACT ONE:**

_Justice Lies Awake_

**CHAPTER TWO**

* * *

  


“No more sopor!” you say.

Gamzee looks more bewildered, than anything. Apparently when you said _you are off sopor... forever!_ what he thought you’d meant was _no more sopor... until later!_ You’d walked in on him and a pie, removed it hence, and now discontent is beginning to shine through the thick dopey fug of Gamzee Makara. He looks like a woeful barkbeast. Only a short while ago this might have made your bloodpusher twinge, but now you are running on brutal determinism and yesterday’s breakfast. Your mouth is very dry.

“I thought you might’ve been harshed up against sopor pies on account of wanting one,” he says. “I was like, _sure as shit, sis_. We can get up a motherfuckin’ party out of it. Talk it up. Take a break. You been all tense coils lately, sister, all coiled tense.”

“This is _not_ for me,” you tell him severely, and you dump the baked sopor pie back into his recuperacoon. It doesn’t break up. It floats there, looking at you balefully, and you poke at it with the pie pan until the chunks sink to the bottom. “This is for _you._ ”

You pull a vial of denatonium out of your pocket; it took a good chunk out of your wages, but you are taking no risks. It gets dumped unceremoniously into the filtration sac at the side of the cocoon. It will take more sopor than he gets rationed to take away the taste of the gourmeterrorists’ most bitter compound; it would have been just like him to eat his bed in a fit of desperation. “Gamzee, you are not going to be high from now until after the examinations are finished. Do you even know what those pies _contain?_ I am putting the kibosh on pies! Sopor is a hell of a drug.”

He gauges this. “So what you’re rapping is no more pies -- at all?”

“I meant what I said. Cold gobblebeast, Mr. Makara.”

This does not seem to sink in. “But Terecita, I _like_ pies.”

“I like dragons, but you don’t see me eating them -- ”

“Well, shit, if you wanted a dragon, just could’ve all up and said -- ”

“Gamzee, this is _serious.”_

“Damn, wicked sister, ain’t I being serious as serious gets? Pies get me through my fucking night. Take the edge off. Helps me take the rough harshes everyone’s all about up here. Not much to do but eat pie and see the sweetness, you dig?”

“I do _not_ dig,” you say. “Gamzee, if you don’t get passing marks on your examinations we are going to get sent to Eat Shit And Die planet, there to colonize the scentless monochrome people of No Sopor Ever -- no, that is a made-up planet, do not interrupt. I know it’s going to be hard, but if I drill you you _will_ get the marks, and we will both graduate to a good assignment.”

He considers the ceiling, both walls, and then finally you. The expression on his face is a little understanding now, almost _indulgent,_ which makes you burn with a peculiar shame. “Girl,” he says, “uh, don’t go getting pale at me now, like that is a flattery of god damn diamond proportions but -- ”

Heat rises in your cheeks. “Gamzee, you awful fucking dimwit! I am not trying to pacify you, I am trying to school you before I have to _drub you!”_

“You ain’t gonna drub me,” he says.

“Would you like to make a bet?”

“You ain’t gonna drub me,” he repeats, and he slides back against his desk and tilts his head against the wall, a very liquid movement. Gamzee slouches, he saunters, he slides. There is never any hard edge or necessity to him, and that’s what you need; urgency! “You would have already up and drubbed me, and I don’t want to make you take your little rhythm stick and get whack with my person. Not cool for you. Not cool for me. Shit’s kinda lamentable.”

For not the first time, you look him right in the face and feel hopeless. You have tried to come at him with levity. You have tried to come at him with seriousness. Both crashed against his cold clown cliff like harmless bubbly wavelets. Through hook and crook -- whether that crook was legally wicked or otherwise -- people have generally done what you asked them to do. It has not all been fun and games. Your fingers have been burnt upon the likes of Vriska, upon Sollux, upon Karkat Vantas.

But your subjugglator partner responds to neither hook nor crook. “What did you think coming up on the ships would be _like?”_

Gamzee shrugs indifferently. You press, “What did you think being a _subjugglator_ was like?”

He shrugs again. “Dunno,” he says. “Didn’t really think about what being a subjugglator’d be like, wicked sis, thought more about what being me would be like. Still working on that little sucker.”

“You are shitting me.”

“Kills me how you think I’m this stone-cold liar, baby girl,” he says, and there is this funny note to it that isn’t apologetic. It is the sulky tone you have come to recognise is his flash of irritation, which usually disappears swiftly out of some desperation to not be unhappy. Tonight you’re not interested. You hate the nickname: _baby girl_. It is such a _stupid_ term for post-fetal mammal creatures. It is such a stupid name for you. “I tell truths.”

You drum your fingers on the desk, and then you perch on the desk itself. You let your voice fill with tones of such sweetness and light you should very well crap candyfloss. “I am not asking you to impress me,” you say. “Who would care if they impressed me? I am already naturally impressed. But passing would be impressive, nonetheless, even to people who are notoriously difficult to garner good opinions from. For instance: Karkat.”

You trail off. It is cunning as a mallet to the face. But you know you have him, because he is staring at you with a measure of the same glazed intensity he’d had when you asked him about Tavros. A slightly hopeless patience. Young love. You are tired and irritable and a little jealous, for about six very stupid reasons. “I suspect he might even find it,” you say, “highly conciliatory.”

This is as unsubtle as you can get without including a saucy wink. You hop off the desk before he can say anything else. Good time for an exit.  
  


* * *

  


  


  


In the early stages, your plan is a miserable failure.

Gamzee’s system is so used to sopor that his body goes all out of whack. You had researched the symptoms and coming-down carefully -- you know, just in case one of them was “death,” -- but they seemed manageable. _Restlessness. Nervous energy. Anxiety. Loss of fine motor control._ You allotted a week for him to come down. It was not to be so.

You would have loved restlessness. He starts dozing off openly in class, so sometimes you have to pop your glasses on his face as a last-ditch attempt to make his oculars seem open. Alternately when you meet him in the evenings his eyes have fine clusters of syrupy orange pocks at the corners: a sure sign of sleeplessness, like he’s been staying up all day, and when he’s like _that_ his hand will slowly rise in class to make the most inane comments anyone has ever heard. It is open season for sniggers. 

He goes off his food. Faint lines of unhappiness appear at his mouth. You would feel guilty, except that all other options are the front lines of Buttghost Planet.

The mock examinations finish. Results are posted up openly outside the classrooms, papering a rustly vanilla swathe that cuts half a walkway of academic achievement. Marks are listed in order of highest score to lowest, as trolls are nothing if not brutally competitive; you are right at the top. One hundred percent for everything. One hundred and two percent for _Court Law._ You’d found a mistake in one of the questions and rewrote it complete with footnotes, causing you to gain bonus marks and marks to be lost from every other legislacerator who hadn’t done the same. They had all been mad as ripperwasps! You’d been deliriously hopeful that you’d prove the General wrong and gain your thirty percent in bonus points, up until the announcement that overkill marks wouldn’t be awarded in the real thing.

Right at the bottom is Gamzee Makara. He is dead last. He is outclassed even by that one subjugglator girl who reputedly spells the word _subjugglator_ with an extra ‘u’ and three ‘t’s, the one with a giggle like rusty nails. You are speechless. If he had written only his name on the paper he would have merited a _DID NOT SIT;_ instead, he has somehow managed to get _zero percent,_ avoiding marks as deftly as though they were landmines. You see him smiling over his zeroes like fat circular miracles. At his smile you nearly go shithive maggots then and there, which would have involved ripping off all your clothes, declaring yourself Queen of the Dragons and then trying to scream Gamzee to death.

You’d think this would have softened the other trainees towards you. It does not. They laugh openly now when you try to rouse him in class, talking as loudly as they dare. “Makes you wonder why she doesn’t bump him off,” you’ve heard.

“I hear they’re _crazy_ pale. Like, they got caught piling in one of the supply closets.”

“At least there’s a lot of him to pap -- ”

“ _Please,_ we have lunch after class, I can’t even deal.”

“ -- probably thinks they’ll let her do the exam for him, anyway...”

You have realised: they need to see you brought low. They hunger for your fall. Inside your head you burn, you burn, you burn.

At this point _you_ begin picking at your food, and then you and Gamzee start skipping meals altogether. When you wrap up sodium crackers for mutual snack consumption you remember what they said about _pale_ and toss them in a trash receptacle, absurdly miserable. You are restless, clumsy, on-edge; you begin to wonder if they _will_ let you take the exam for him. Surely you’ve written up so many study guides for Gamzee and Scripture class you could pass without ever having attended a single schoolfeed, and probably do quite well, considering. When you type up neatly-arranged notes and make delicious flash cards with helpfully drawn diagrams it’s still no use: he has devolved to mutters and only pays attention to his tablet, opening up endless message logs to Karkat that never get reply.

GC: K4RK4T YOU P13C3 OF SH1T  
GC: 1 H4V3 NO 1D34 WH4T YOU 4R3 UND3RGO1NG, 1 C4NNOT 3V3N M4K3 PR3T3NS3 4T 1M4G1N1NG  
GC: 4LL 1 C4N S4Y 1S:  
GC: TH1S 1S M3, B3GG1NG  
GC: PL34S3!  
GC: 1 4M 4LL OUT OF 1D34S  
GC: 1T 1S R34LLY R4TH3R DUMB HOW MUCH 1 M1SS YOU R1GHT NOW  
GC: FR4NKLY, 1T 1S DOWNR1GHT MOTH3RFUCK1NG HUM1L14T1NG  
GC: YOU C4N S33 1 4M NOW 4N 4CCULTUR4T3D CLOWN CULT1ST!  
GC: 1 W1SH 1 KN3W WH4T MY LUSUS WOULD S4Y  
GC: OH, WHO DO 1 H4V3 TO BL4M3 BUT MYS3LF >:?

In this, you are wretchedly similar.

  


* * *

  


Classes drag on. A great deal of downtime you spend in the practise gym, cane replaced with duelling rapier -- the traditional strifekind of the legislacerator is the halberd, but that’s ceremonial and only for ascension to the Cruellest Bar. Likelihood of you making it to the Cruellest Bar after sectional on the Planet of Nook-Seeking Centipedes is grim. You drag Gamzee to practice, and he divides his time between sleeping standing-up and sleeping sitting-down. Sometimes, in the very depths of despair, you let him sleep. Sometimes in the very depths _below_ that you poke him awake, whereupon he calls the training dummy ‘bro’ and carries on a long, rambling conversation with it as his club comes down on its head.

They send all trainee pairs out to do a judicious cull as part of the exam practical. Gamzee cannot help but apologise slurringly to the training dummy. He won’t lay a hit in sparring class, and he won’t lay a hit on you. At times you have thought wildly about trying to make him, about forcing his hand, making him choose defense or his life, but these are all thoughts borne from living on caffeine sludges. You are a little afraid of them; the thoughts, not the caffeine sludges, though sometimes you take so many you lie awake in your recuperacoon mouthing Karkat’s favourite Thre$ha songs rather than sleeping.

“Subjugglator Makara,” you say, “how are you ever going to _subjugglate_ someone?”

As the nights pass he has grown more langorous, heavy-limbed, ocular-lidded. An involuntary shiver runs through him. Then another. “Dunno,” he says, which is his favourite answer lately, “hard to fucking think.”

“We do it just like I told you. You hit the cull, and I will take the slash. No muss, no fuss, just so long as you lay a hit on them.”

“Ain’t you protective nowadays,” he says. He rocks gently from heel to toe, long arms swinging very gently as he balances his clubs in his hands. “Softening all the worsts, trying your little damndest in my direction. That’s fucking -- shit, sis, that’s just.”

You wait, but apparently the trailing-off means he has forgotten the rest of his sentence. You kick the base of the dummy over and step on its reset button, grubflesh skittering up from its cortex and ballooning to form a fresh target. You set it to passive. “Pretend the dummy has just said offensive things to Tavros,” you suggest, but he just stares at the dummy with thick concern. “Pretend the dummy has just punched out Karkat.” Still nothing. These aren’t your best attempts, but you are at the end of your highly frayed tether. “Pretend the dummy is talking too loud! Pretend _anything.”_

Gamzee reaches out and, with the tip of his club, presses on the dummy’s chest. He follows through gently and the mass of grubflesh rocks back, falling to the floor with a meaty _whunk._ You are not sure whether or not you can count this as a win. “That was good,” you say. “I mean, you still are in the lower quartile of incompetence, but at least you have finally made it on the chart.”

“Terezi.” It’s slow. He keeps turning his club over and over in one hand, rolling it low on his wrist.

“Gamzee?”

“It’s so bright.”

You look at him. His gaze bores through the hull of the ship and stares starkly out into space. His pupils are pinpricks ringed with dark bluesy violet, the exact colour of blackberries and the exact scent of chewy grape candy. Ice grips your bloodpusher, just for a second. “Terecita,” he says, and his voice is funny and scratchy: “It’s _SO FUCKING BRIGHT.”_

You give him reprieve to go have a rest before you study _Introduction To Law,_ aided by a selection of flashcards and your loyal TA Lecturer Limepaw. This gives you reprieve to go and sit at your desk and have a gigantic pan-ache, one of those awful ones that starts right behind your eyebrows and travels up the roots of your hair. Sometimes you feel the ghost of the burn that blinded you, just an old sleepy echo of its pain, but only when you are stressed right down to your last shriek. That ghost pounds around in your skull right now.

At first you don’t even notice the envelope in your quarters; it must have been slid underneath your door. When you open it up it contains a plain piece of paper, not computer flimsy, scribbled upon in thick black pen. You read its contents with growing horror:

  


THE AVERAGE COOLANT GRUB LEAKS A SUBSTANCE HARMLESS TO MOST

BUT WILL ACT AS FURTHER DEPRESSANT INGESTED BY A TROLL WITH ANY REMNANT SOPOR IN THEIR NERVOUS SYSTEM

THIS GRUB MUCUS CAN BE PUT IN FOOD OR MIXED WITH DRINKING WATER

MASSIVE SEIZURES FOLLOW WHICH WILL GET A TRAINEE CULLED FOR INFIRMITY

INFIRMITY CULLING INVOLVES NO COURT MARTIAL

THERE ARE COOLANT GRUBS ALL AROUND YOU  


  


You rip the piece of paper to tiny shreds. You chew the wadded-up remnants until you can taste both smearing marker ink and conspiracy. Then you flush the spittle-coated scraps down the gaper.

Afterwards, you wish you hadn’t. Although whoever wrote it took great pains to hide their tracks -- if it had been electronic skin you could have given it to Sollux, had him crack it open to discover its secrets -- you still could have gleaned _something._ Fingerprints, for instance. Troll Arthur Conan Doyle suggested that handwriting could not just only be traced back to an individual, but be used for personality analysis. Troll Arthur Conan Doyle was also a Summoner obsessee who thought fairies were legit, however, so you have had a pick’n’mix approach to his forensic experiments. You could have tested the marker ink. You could have done something that isn’t pacing a hole in your flooring, feeling sick to your nutrient pouch.

But pace your floor you do, until the light rap on your door. “Come in,” you say, surprised and distracted by Gamzee’s apparent punctuality, in no mood for anything but paranoia and gnawing on your own kidneys -- but it turns out to not be Gamzee. A strange subjugglator trainee lets the door slide shut behind her. You startle so badly you break all your rules: you let your step twitch in the direction of your ablution block. You let your hands tighten on your cane. You do everything, in short, to broadcast your emotional state.

But she is not here to attack or indict! You recognise this girl, vaguely. She is a curly-haired, dark-eyed highblood, one teamed to a sulky young legislacerator with whom you are on more familiar terms. 

“If you are here about the mock exam on your partner’s behalf,” you say, “I did not convene it, and I don’t care about his marks. I will drink his tears. To me they are delicious. But that’s platonic if he asks; he has been getting downright hateful in class to me, and I am not interested.”

“Are you sure, Teach?” she says, which surprises you. You gather your wits and examine her; her nails are carefully painted a hard shiny purple, and so is her mouth. “He’s quite good-looking. And popular. He plays the sub-audible fluthluhorn.”

“I am not in a dating frame of mind, even for a sub-audible fluthluhorn. What do you want?”

The subjugglator smiles. She knows your disadvantage. “Congratulations on the marks,” she says. “A hundred percent in everything, a hundred and two for Court Law. My ninety-nine in Religious Law is paltry by comparison. They won’t make motherfucking anything of me now.”

The invective is a little uneasy in her mouth; on some subjugglators religious epithets come naturally, on others they sound formal and grafted. Now you recognise her better. In different circumstances you might have charted more closely the subjugglator and legislacerative trainees running to topple your throne, but in this case your throne is both cement-legged for untopplability and sinking fast. You are indifferent to your competition, even moreso prodigious young subjugglators.

“I accept your congratulations,” you say. “I parcel them up for later use, probably to mix tinctures of elf worries. Why are you here?”

Without asking she saunters in and sits on your desk. Indigoblood arrogance can make bluebloods look meek as squeakbeasts. They would make Vriska bust out in _wow! Sno8s!!!!!!!!_ without an moment’s irony. “Alehks only made eighty-six percent in his _Court.,_ and that was hard-fought. My poor partner’s plateaued. He should have been a Scienterminator instead; he flounders with law. Even without your interference he would have got a miserable ninety, I know.”

The subjugglator crosses one leg artfully over the other, and gives a little _ah, well_ shrug. “End honours will go to Legislacerator Kaddil and Subjugglator Aionah and their ninety-five percent average, and my career will begin on some bureaucretin supply ship arresting for fraudulent provision manifests -- am I the only one who despises _mediocre_ genius, Pyrope?”

This pretty, careful little conversation tells you a number of things. The worst thing it tells you is that you no idea who any of these people are, and you are wrung with a terrible regret that the last few perigees have been spent with flash cards and worry. What happened to the idea that training was meant to be enjoyable? Where were your parties? Where was your experimentation with drugs, pailing and hairstyles?

“It’s a thing that keeps me awake all day,” you say, and you smile. Nobody likes your smile.

“You know my marks.” You actually don’t! But she continues: “Top in both Scripture classes. Ninety-nine in Culling, Introduction to Religious Law and the physicals, ninety-eight in Religious Law. Don’t stop me, I feel the heart of rhetoric has to be supported by the god damn details, Teach. My current score is two hundred and ninety-seven, five hundred and sixty-six when paired with Alehks’s -- thirty-four marks below the leading two. Rather a disappointment. Yours is three hundred and two out of three hundred, _remaining_ at three hundred due to your partner’s improbable score of _zero_. Fifty percent.”

Her lips and nails smell like hard candy. The white paint on her face is flawlessly done, a pierrot tear beneath each eye, mouth lovely and mocking. “I am sure we will all see vast improvement from Mr. Makara, though,” she says.

You keep smiling, leaning on your cane. “Vast.”

“You seem to have been trying very hard with him.”

“He is a true delight to drill!” you say.

“Have you been after his pale quadrant a long or a short time?”

“Who’s to say we’re not piling?”

“Please. You’d be sleeping together, and the tide-marks on your recuperacoon say there hasn’t been any two-body overflow.”

“That is -- actually an excellent assertion,” you say, and you mean it. Your first thought would not have been of recuperacoon tide-marks. “Worthy of a legislacerator, not just a subjugglator. You will go far. Now, if you’re done with your snide shipping assertions, I am trying to smell a point in all this -- ”

“We’d make five hundred and ninety-seven,” she says softly, and leans forward. Her eyes are shining. “At the least. Early deployment out of the _Executor._ Placement on the Judge Advocate General’s flagship, or even on the Grand Highblood’s. Or at the Imperial Court. When are you going to stop fucking around with your sopor-addled palemate and think about your future?”

You hear Parlet’s voice in your head, dazed: _clown cultists are not briefcases, recruit._ Something about the subjugglator’s voice makes your gorge rise in panic, not the heady adrenaline-rush of fear but an onset of prickle-skinned anxiety. Your palms are slick. You taste iron. The highblood continues in the softest, coaxingest little way: “You get rid of my problem and I’ll get rid of yours. I'll tell you in strict confidence: Alehks _is_ waxing black, so all you'd have to do is get him in a corner and say he came on too strong. He could start a fight in an empty room. Everyone knows. And then that dullard Makara will have to come after me — or at least, nobody will be able to say he _didn't_ — and I'll take him out in righteous self-defense. Petty romantic drama. No schoolfeeder on this ship would convict us.”

Your mouth is as dry as your palms are slick. “Will your lacrimals ooze,” you say, “if I tell you I can’t remember your name? I don’t know but I am forgetful as all fuck, trainee.”

They don’t ooze, but there is a fine bunching of the lines at the corner of her mouth that tell you her annoyance far better than tears. “Subjugglator Velher.”

“In times like this,” you say, “I like to flip a coin. I’m not being facetious, I simply think it looks bad ass. Please give me a moment, Subjugglator Velher.”

Both her eyebrows make discontented shapes as you dig out your caegar and amble forward. It is your lucky coin now, sentimental rather than a helpful tool for cool, but its weight in your palm is familiar and comforting. Your thumb passes over the gashed half, remembering its edges. “So what,” she says, voice rich with amusement. “Blank you do it, scratched you don’t?”

The coin sparkles in mid-air as you flip it. You catch it easily, then tip it on the back of your hand for its judgement. Blank. You show her the result, which she smiles charmingly at, and then you tuck it into your pocket.

“No,” you say, and you unsheath your sword from your cane and you whip it to her jugular. “The flip was whether or not I told your legislacerator about your plan to do the murder act upon him. I didn’t think he would have taken it well. Everyone knows he could start a fight in an empty room! _Miracles,_ sister.”

The subjugglator swallows against the point of your blade. It makes a tiny indent on the surface of her throat. Your hand is quivering, and your violence not usually this sloppy nor this uncontained. “Do not use your fear chucklefuckery on me ever again,” you say, failing to keep your voice very even. “Do not stick your long frond into my business. And be _very_ careful with your partner’s life over the exam period, because I know about your intentions -- direct and oblique! -- and would make your court-martial as gruelling as I possibly could.”

Another swallow. “No going near Gamzee,” you say. “No more silly threatening letters. No more visits. Now go and study, ninety-eight percent is a wiggler mark.”

You take a retreating step backwards, sword still levelled at her throat. She stands, and her calculatedly confiding expression has been replaced with the curl of a highblood sneer. “Heresy may be fashionable on a seadweller, Teach,” she says, “but it will see a tealblood swing in the end.”

“I said _go._ Alternian, trainee, do you speak it?”

The door slides open. She looks back at you, merely to launch one last grenade: “ _I_ sent no letter,” says the highblood. “You know where to find me when your mind gets changed.” And the door slides shut after her.

\-- gallowsCalibrator [GC] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG]! --

GC: VR1SK4 1 N33D TO 4SK 4 F4VOR  
AG: Will you get all up in my 8roodpouch if I allow myself some totally well-deserved self-congratul8ions??  
GC: YOU G3T ON3 L1N3 OF DUB1OUSLY D3S3RV3D S3LF-CONGR4TUL4T1ONS!  
GC: GO  
AG: Hahahahahahaha!!!!!!! Knew you’d come crawling on 8ack to me eventually, if I went with the Covertraumatics! Knew you’d end up down on 8oth knees feeling shitty for isol8ing me!  
AG: Now Vriska is the knowledgea8le one!  
AG: Ok. That was nice, I feel 8etter now.  
AG: How can I help? ::::)  
GC: 1 N33D TO F1ND OUT HOW W1D3LY-KNOWN 4 P13C3 OF M3D1C4L KNOWL3DG3 1S 4ND 1 DONT H4V3 TH3 CL34R4NC3  
GC: YOU WONT H4V3 TH3 CL34R4NC3 31TH3R, BUT YOU W1LL B3 4BL3 TO S33 HOW H1GH TH3 CL34R4NC3 L3V3L WOULD B3  
GC: SO PL34S3 RUN 4 S34RCH FOR COOL4NT GRUB EXTRUS1ON 4ND L1NK 1T TO SOPOR 4DD1CT1ON 4ND L3T US S33 WH4T F1SH W3 C4N C4TCH  
AG: The Scourge Sisters ride again.  
AG: Or at least, the Scourge Sisters totally plug some 8oring search terms into the system. Let me just get my 8locker up, I don’t like 8eing on the grid.  
GC: THOS3 4R3 D3F1N1T3LY SOM3 COMPUT3R T3RMS YOU 4R3 US1NG NOW  
GC: R3M3MB3R WH3N YOU US3D TO TH1NK TH4T YOU COULD R3MOV3 P3OPL3S CLOTH3S 1N P1CTUR3S W1TH PHOTOCHOP  
AG: Wow, zip it.  
AG: Who the fuck is helping you here? Me, that’s who.  
AG: And you may not 8elieve it, 8ut I’m kind of leet nowadays.  
GC: H4H4H4H4 1 D3F1N1T3LY DONT B3L13V3 1T >:]  
AG: Three hits!  
AG: Fairly high-level clearance needed, I 8n’t getting in here. This is specialized medicallous stuff. There’s a 8ioterrorism label on the files.  
GC: 4LR1GHT TH4T 1S 3NOUGH TO B3 G3TT1NG ON W1TH  
AG: W8!  
AG: I can do you one 8etter.  
GC: >:?  
AG: You do know Fussyfangs is a doctorturer over in Court, right? And she owes me like 8y 8illion fucking favors, so hold your hoof8easts and let me ask.  
GC: YOU KNOW 1 D1D NOT 4CTU4LLY KNOW TH4T  
GC: 1 SHOULD H4V3 B33N K33P1NG UP W1TH M1SS P3PP3RM1NT P4RF41T BUT  
GC: 1 H4V3NT 3V3N K3PT UP W1TH N3P3T4 OR 4NYTH1NG 1T H4S B33N MOTH3RFUCK1NG CR4ZY 4ROUND H3R3  
GC: H4 H4 H4 NOW 1 4M JUST R4MBL1NG L1K3 4N 4WFUL P3RSON  
AG: Ok, so never say ‘motherfucking’ ever again.  
AG: Next thing you know I’ll have to for8id you from drinking Faygo.  
GC: F4YGO 1SNT 4CTU4LLY TH4T B4D L1K3 TH3 GR4P3 FL4VOR 1SNT HORR1BL3 4T 4LL 4ND TH3 D13T STUFF T4ST3S OK  
AG: Don’t care!!!!!!!!  
GC: STR4WB3RRY 1S R1GHT OUT THOUGH  
AG: Kanaya says that the info you want isn’t widely known at all and isn’t in any of her 8ooks.  
AG: Says your average surgicallous medic wouldn’t know it, let alone just any8ody.  
GC: OK TH1S N4RROWS MY F13LD TH4NK K4N4Y4 V3RY MUCH FOR M3  
AG: I get thanks too, right?  
GC: Y3S  
GC: TH4NK YOU >:]  
AG: ::::)  
GC: TH4NK YOU FOR B31NG SUCH 4 BUTT!!!  
AG: Wow, mature!!!!!!!!  
AG: Hey. I know that a normal person would come to me in a 8eat of a 8loodpusher, but not you. What’s up? Why do you care a8out coolant gru8s?  
GC: 1 K1ND OF DONT W4NT TO T4LK 4BOUT 1T  
GC: 1T H4S B33N 4 V3RY V3RY V3RY V3RY LONG N1GHT  
GC: 4ND N1GHTS TO COM3 W1LL ONLY G3T LONG3R  
AG: Yeah.  
AG: I think I know how you feel!  
GC: R34LLY >:?  
AG: This isn’t what I expected!  
AG: None of it is.  
AG: 8etween you and me, I don’t think I’m cut out to be some dum8 covertraumatic operative, following orders from idiots. I’m going to do things my own way! Get promoted! 8e a mover and a shaker! Get some glory!  
AG: I’m going to stand out. ::::)  
GC: VR1SK4 WH4T YOU JUST S41D 1S L1K3 4 T3XTBOOK 3X4MPL3 OF 1NSUBORD1N4T1ON 4ND 4LSO V3RG3S ON TR34SON >:[ >:[  
GC: DO YOU KNOW HOW M4NY P3OPL3 W4LK 4W4Y FROM TR34SON TR14LS  
GC: Z3RO!!!!  
GC: 4 B1G F4T Z3RO  
AG: This is where you and I differ. This is why I never really cared a8out legislacer8ion.  
AG: Anyone dum8 enough to end up in a court8lock is too dum8 to save!  
GC: Y3S W3LL  
GC: YOU 4R3 W3LL KNOWN FOR W4NT1NG TO SL33P ON 4 B1G P1L3 OF C4NDY YOU STOL3 FROM W1GGL3RS  
AG: Why do the wigglers have candy anyway? Do they think they should get candy and not have to fight for it???????? I am teaching the wigglers to 8e strong.  
GC: Y3S Y3S  
GC: 1 4M GO1NG TO GO H4V3 4 R3ST NOW  
GC: 1 W4S M34NT TO S33 G4MZ33 BUT 1 W1LL C4NC3L 1 DO NOT TH1NK H3 1S F33L1NG TOO GR34T 4NYW4Y  
GC: TWO TROLLS H4V3 4PPRO4CH3D M3 W4NT1NG M3 TO KILL H1M 4ND 1 4M OFF1C14LLY CLOS3D FOR TH3 N1GHT R3: G4MZ33 D34THS!  
AG: Awwwwwwww. That’s kind of sweet. :::;)  
GC: 1S 1T  
GC: H3R3 1S 4 S3CR3T  
GC: FOR TWO S3CONDS 1 HON3STLY THOUGHT 4BOUT 1T  
AG: ::::O  
AG: Hot!  
GC: Y3S 1 4M SO GL4D YOU 4R3 TH3 P3RSON 1 CHOS3 TO SH4R3 MY 1NN3R THOUGHTS W1TH TH4T W4S MY T4K3 3X4CTLY

\-- gallowsCalibrator [GC] ceased trolling arachnidsGrip [AG]! --  
  


* * *

  


Examinations draw close. The trouble really begins when you are called out of Contract Law by a runner, who bears no note so mystifying than that you are wanted by the Comedic Chaplain. Your Contract Law schoolfeeder looks as puzzled as you are, but issues you a pass. Later you will regret his acceptance, but what could he have done? There is just as much hemocaste politicking among the trainers as there is among the trainees. If any shits and giggles eventuate for your schoolfeeders around the cool liquids dispenser, you suspect the ratio of shits to giggles is vastly skewed depending on blood.

So you trot along like a bewildered bleatbeast to the slaughter, lead through the myriad hallways of the ship to a Scripture classroom. What you smell first is the tension. In the tiered seats a multitude of Subjugglator eyes glitter at you, and at the front of the classroom is Gamzee, defiant, sulky. These are not usual postures you have associated with Gamzee Makara. There is a stiffness to his hands, a blankness to see you, juxtaposed to the anticipatory glee from the serried ranks of his fellows.

“Sir?” you say, unsure.

Chaplain Chazot says, “Subjugglator Makara has interrupted class.”

Subjugglators are not docile students. In the early days of Culling Law -- especially amongst the more fervent of the teenage faithful -- they would argue the toss as their legislacerative partner tried hard to look unassociated. The Comedic Chaplain would take all this with the grace of someone who had seen more than one mucous-nasalled trainee make religious argument, and it would usually end in a vicious set-down or a knock-knock joke. A light whipping too, for some: the Church believes in mortification of the flesh, that the drawing of blood is sacrament. This close to examination time interruptions and whippings are few, but none of them have ever been caused by _Gamzee._

You say stupidly, “Sir?”

Comedic Chaplain Chazot usually has a smile for you, even if it is ridiculously dental. For your best answers you even get an exclamation of _sweet precious pupa!,_ and a gift of the truly shitty candy kept in a jar on the desk. You worry about that candy; it looks like fingernails. Now Chazot’s mouth is impassive, humourless, heavy filigreed horns held still.

“Subjugglator Makara has proved this night to be unrighteously insubordinate,” says the Chaplain. “Subjugglator Makara has interrupted my class _six frigging times_ with his willful questioning of my command, the Big Book of Circus Humour and the _Messiahs themselves,_ can you believe it?” You look to Gamzee; his face betrays nothing. The corners of his mouth are turned down, and his shoulderblades smell set hard in his back. “So you know what, little legislacerator. I say, _dang, I’m all out of punishments._ You decide your partner’s fate.”

You are relieved. When you’ve asked Gamzee before if disciplinary clobbers hurt, he has just scratched one horn and said, _nah, sis, I just up and go to a different place in my head, think unwhomped thoughts_. “I would recommend a behavioural-management whipping,” you say. “Proportionate to the interruption.”

The subjugglators do not break out into hoots. They simply all get very focused, and there is more than one smile in the array of painted faces -- Velher’s is one of them, wreathed all over her pretty mouth. Later you will wonder if you imagined Gamzee’s wince. “Fine decision,” says the Chaplain. “Shirt off, legislacerator, or twice with it on.”

There must be some horrible mistake. “Sir?”

“Subjugglator Makara doesn’t feel the gentle chuckles of a miracle run through him when he gets his precious little glutes beat,” says the subjugglator schoolfeeder. “So today his holy chastisement goes to you, and you picked the method. Let’s see if he enjoys the shit out of _this.”_

Everyone watches as hard as they can. Their eyes go right through you.

  


You take off your jacket, and you fold it up, and you pass it to Gamzee. Plenty of trainees pick twice with it on. Plenty of trainees, though, are picking with tealblood legislacerators who only give warning whacks. Your Court Law schoolfeeder believes in a single crack across the horns and is done with it, but your Court Law schoolfeeder is not a follower of the Mirthful Messiahs. Nonplussed, you fumble with your shirt in a bother, pulling it down to your waist and left in your underbinds; you are all thumbs. “Hands on the wall, sweetness,” says the chaplain, and again like a bleatbeast you do so.

Chaplain Chazot pulls out a switch. You smell black leather and oil.

The first blow hits you in the humiliation. You have prided yourself on receiving not the merest ass-beat in all your time of training, which is something most of your classmates cannot brag. But to be whipped in _front_ of a class by a teacher who likes you -- in front of not even your class but the Subjugglator cohort, in front of chalkpaste expressions with split-grey grins -- is a special destruction. You have very little time to wonder what Gamzee said. The second blow hits you in the pain.

You are not big, as trolls go. You were not made to take punishment, and as a fighter you have trained to keep yourself from taking it. Vriska used to call you a _glass cannon,_ with a mingled contempt and deep, contented pride. The first blows across your back take some of the wind out of you and pound right in the filtration organs; your knees buckle. The second criss-crosses higher. All resolve to not cry out ends somewhere around the time of the fifth, and you count no higher than twenty stripes but it feels like a hundred. You smell your own minty weals flushed with blood, the salt sweat at your temples, all the shivers of your body that tell you you may very well be sick.

Gamzee does not look at you. Gamzee’s expression does not shift. Gamzee’s expression has not shifted the whole time, nor has he flinched. He holds your jacket louchely, letting it fall by one arm to trail on the ground. As the leather whistles through the air to land into your meat again, he stifles a yawn.

Your disbelief turns to fury. From fury turns the first snarls of contempt; your secretly pale passes, made from guilt and need and wistful impotence, are kicked to the trash furnace and pissed upon. What’s left then is derision. Why did you ever think this would work out? What’s left then is hot repugnance: Gamzee! _Gamzee!_ Stupid, moronic, sopor-addled Gamzee! Feckless, careless, thoughtless, stone cold _**Gamzee!**_

Blood soaks down into your uniform trousers. You have never been beaten. Had the shit kicked out of you, certainly, without your tenure as Vriska Serket’s FLARP partner you never would have stomached this. But as you let out a squawk like a mewbeast trapped in a compressor dryer, you have not proven yourself a Scourge Sister worthy of the name.

A hundred sweeps pass. From very far away the Chaplain says, “That’s as much time as I’m prepared to fucking waste on you, Makara,” and you hold yourself, back afire, pain doing a formation march down your spine. “Ready to rejoin us like a civilized goddamn believer?”

You somehow wobble upright, glasses slipping down your nose with sweat. Gamzee offers you your jacket as casually as he might a stranger at a party, unbothered, an afterthought. “Whatever, preacher,” he drawls.

“Dismissed.” The Chaplain is sharp with disgust. “Pyrope, sweet, get your ass back to class.”

You do not get your ass back to class. You cannot even pull your shirt back on. You stagger away from all those staring eyes and struggle on your jacket, gagging as its hem brushes hurt, creeping through the emptied hallways back to your quarters. When you are there you somehow manage to neatly upchuck into the gaper, and after that you lie flat on your belly on the floor. Your forehead is hot and the steel flooring blessedly cool, and your back feels like seeping lava.

After a while you pull Pyralspite from your sylladex and hold him next to your head, and you stroke his soft fluffy belly. You cry from shame and pain both, sick with sorrow and the sheer miserable ignominy, the stupid senselessness of it. By comestible break every trainee on board will know that Gamzee Makara earned you a mid-class whaling, and that you shrieked like a wiggler the whole way through. 

You don’t register it when your door opens, not until your partner wafts in like a long-limbed bad smell. You do not fully register his audacity when he comes to kneel beside you, an awed noise sounding low in his throat. “Girl,” says Gamzee, “you look like mincemeat.”

It is too much to bear. With a caterwaul worthy of Nepeta Leijon you rise to strike, grabbing him by the shirtfront and digging your claws in deep. He grabs your wrists with one hand and lowers you to the floor, other hand pressing your cheek down inexorably. “Peace,” he says, in a tone you’re more used to, all soft and burred with tiredness. “Peace, wicked sister, you just rethink your pan about this one.”

“If you shoosh me,” you say, voice trembling, “I’ll _kill_ you.”

“Why would a guy up and fucking do that?” You struggle. You dig your claws into the soft heels of his hands. The burredness changes with the frustration, transmutes, makes his voice go hard and girdered: “I ain’t trying to pacify you, Terecita, I AM TRYING TO FUCKING _SCHOOL_ YOU.”

It echoes all around your quarters, and each echo splits off strangely. For a moment your throat clamps up and you quiver, a little demented with sudden squirms of fear; he used _chucklevoodoos_ on you! But as quickly as it begins it’s over and his hands ease up, as though he’s as shocked as you are. Gamzee’s voice is back to normal, and there is a very real note of unhappiness in it. “Hey, this is some malfunction bullshit right about here, did you think I wanted that to happen all in my heart -- ”

“Why would it matter what you _wanted?_ What did you do, Gamzee! What did you _do?”_

“They were speaking blasphemies,” he says doggedly. At _that_ particular factoid you struggle again and his hands tighten, flatten your hands to the floor and your head still so that all wriggling does is put you in pain. “Quit it, sis. _Quit_ it.”

It’s still too close to pale. You are very far beyond this last indignity. You snarl through your teeth like you used to when you were young and playing at dragon, back when your future personal career option was dragon and you were bereft at the revelation by your lusus that this would never happen. “You and your stupid, boring _blasphemies!”_ you snap. “Let me go. Let me go immediately, haven’t you done enough -- ”

“Hush up,” he says. “I’ll be good. There’s a promise. I dunno but I’ll up and god damn jump through all your hoops, how about that?”

“Fuck you. I am going to bite you. Just wait! Let me up!”

“You hush now.” He takes away the hand holding your head. You strain your neck up, teeth bared as he says again, “Look at the technicoloured fucking mess they went and made of you,” and you are dismayed to hear the note of revelation in his voice. “Your back all blue. Your blood all bright. How does your back even know how to up and do that? _Damn,_ sister, you want to see this business of yours?”

_“Gamzee!”_

He swipes a finger along the slippery, still-crusting blood glugging down the small of your back. You are rendered sort of speechless as he presses his finger just underneath your eyes, over your cheekbones, leaves two stripes and then goes back for more. He paints each side of your mouth with your own blood. His hands are surprisingly big and coarse and unkind, long hands, long fingers. “Bitch’s tits,” he breathes, “look at what we’re witnessing in this jamming collab.”

You are undone. You shake with an anger you cannot even name, some of the most overwhelming anger that you have ever felt that shakes your flesh from your bones and makes your gut ache. His hand on your mouth is the switch, and but for its removal you would’ve bit his finger down to the bone.

  


“I’ll be good, I’ll play smart,” says Gamzee, meditatively. Another swipe. “I’ll run in time with all this test chicanery, give you lash for lash and shit. Get all studential. Look all those exams in the eye and make sure they look me back dead in the ocular so that we _god damn understand each other,_ write the meaningless shitty drivelspittle, get so quiet they will mistake me for a _mother fucking hopbeast._ Will you shut the fuck up if I do that?”

“ _I’m_ not the one who needs to zip their awful fucking flap, Subjugglator.”

Your blood is thick and fresh and bright on your face. The corner of your tongue flicks out and catches a little, and your tastebuds register it as fresh sea salt, mouthwash manganese. He lets you go very slowly, and you shutter your eyelids down and lean over, hands braced on your knees. Now that you are docile he sounds a little more like himself again when he says, “Aw, girl.”

“I am going to lie down of my own free will and get some sleep,” you hear yourself croak, your voice quite small. “You are going to leave. Go. Abscond. You can eat a sopor pie, even, whatever you like.”

Big hands lift you underneath your armpits. You are ladled into your recuperacoon, trousers and all, and the merciless sting of the sopor on your weals dulls as the slime begins its work. You let it seep into your hair, your epidermals, the backsides of your ears, and you aim your glare balefully up at his general position.

“No more sopor pie, partner,” says Gamzee, and he clatters himself down at your desk instead. He gathers up all the notes and spreads them in an untidy rainbow in front of your husktop, a spread of flimsy and flash cards, and you watch his long slope of a back hunch down over your notes. “I’m on a fucking wonder wagon to sobriety, and that’s all thanks to _you.”_

There is a hard edge of bitterness to him, overt and sour. The sopor makes you feel heavy and soft and velvety. “What are you doing?”

“Mother fucking studying, ain’t I?”

“The hoofbeast has left the stable,” you say, dazed, altogether too close to hysterical. You are tired. You are in a lot of pain. You have not eaten for a while. “The hoofbeast broke its leg in a hole and we had to shoot it. The culling practicum is tomorrow, Mr. Makara! Our first written exam is the night after _that._ We are going to get sent to Stagnant Water Estuary planet, and we are going to be stuck together forever around a bunch of giant -- ”

Your subjugglator partner gets up from the desk and dunks you in the sopor. You bob up to the top, spluttering and scrubbing it from your face, but its proximity to your mucous membranes puts you out entirely. “Go the fuck to sleep,” he says, and he wipes his hands disgustedly on his pants. “That was way too damn close to a pap.”

Slowly, unwillingly, mercifully, you do.  
  


* * *

  


When you wake up, Gamzee is gone. Your desk is untidy; there are books littered on the floor like empty wrappers. You feel odd and sluggish from your first full-day’s sleep in a very long while, and it is only when you clamber out the recuperacoon that you remember your back. You rinse your mouth and tidy your hair in a drunken haze of pain, and the close on your uniform zips up like a toothache.

You have missed out on early-evening nutrient gruel. You have missed out on the pre-examination briefing. Never mind; it’s a pass-fail affair, and you know the method by heart. You rap on Gamzee’s door. There is no reply, for good or for bad. You hurry down abandoned hallways and head starboard, where your whole cohort will be waiting to have their chance in the cullpit.

It is, really, a warm-up for the exams. A chance to blow off steam. They bring in a single troll who has been deemed cullable, and you will say the Imperial-approved words (“By the power vested in me as the righteous claw of the Empress, I will remove your taint from our people”) and cull them. Many trolls will have already made another troll die, lawfully or unlawfully. Every single one of you has seen it done. Most are even enthusiastic, though you’ve got no particular appetite for the job. The only appetite that matters _here_ is Gamzee’s: you feel strangely wretched. He has never raised his hand to anyone in violence. Reluctance or hesitation would mean an instant fail.

A few people give you funny looks and elbow each other, whispering, yesterday’s gossip still fresh. You do not actually care.

You squirm through the crowd you find at the end of a hallway, other pairs of trolls already passing with dripping weapons. Some are laughing, some aren’t. Nobody looks miserable with failure, however. Snatches of conversation: “ -- was bullshit, I’ve only got one clean uniform, if they say use the jugular they could tell you it sprays -- ”

“ -- well, they gave us a _gigantic_ yellowblood, think he used psychics on me, I feel funny -- ”

“ -- wasn’t yellow, dipshit, that was _brown_ \-- ”

“ -- no, seriously, I don’t think I can whistle any more -- ”

You find Gamzee calmly waiting in the huddle, making his club twirl in his fingers idly. For a moment he looks just how he used to when you started training, and you expect an _aw, hey, girl, damn if I know what the mother fuck this line’s for,_ which you don’t receive. There is something hungry and empty to him now. “Hey, sleeping hideous,” is all he says.

“Gamzee! Did you get our registration number? Did you get the identification of our cull? Are we late? Where’s -- ”

“Calm your nug, girl,” he says, “get your nug fucking good and calm. You got three guesses as to which wicked pair’s up for the removal of some poor rustblooded motherfucker who got his name enslaved on this list, all death enacted for the miserable crime of being a _DIRTY FUCKING LOWBLOOD_ who chewed _WAY TOO FUCKING LOUD.”_

People around you are staring. “Or he ate a baby,” says Gamzee.

The line crawls, slow and sure. You have both managed to make awkwardness nigh-on a miasma. Your back hurts, and you would have appreciated some nutrient gruel or some caffeine sludge or some _anything,_ your digestion sac is digesting itself. “We have a plan,” you say, under your breath. “I make the killing blow. You don’t have to...” (You trail off. Don’t have to _what?_ Try? Lift a finger? Take a life, legally but perhaps erroneously?)

“I don’t have to do jack shit, wicked sis,” he says.

“Gamzee -- ”

He pats you familiarly on the back, hard, over the weals. In response you press the heel of your cane into his foot until you smell his grimace. Both of you shuffle the rest of the line in sullen silence.

The cullpit is a shallow depression in a big, sterile, steel-smelling room: a thousand sticky shades of blood assault your nostrils, and it is all noisy affray. There are officers everywhere, taking notes, shouting for some teams to take the floor and for bodies to be dragged to the back. The floor is slippery with lymph of all colours. One legislacerator falls over in it, much to general mirth.

And then there are the culls, trolls who have been deemed unworthy to live. They are cuffed to a waiting-frame, and then their cull team uncuff them and take them away. Some teams, faced with an aggressive subject -- and most of them are aggressive -- try to yell the Imperial culling declaration as fast as they can before going in for the killing blow. Pandemonium ensues.

You and Gamzee are given ugly, bloodspattered visibility spots to pin on the backs of your uniforms, so that the schoolfeeders can see which pair they’re marking; you pick your way through the cries of the dying or the soon to be dead, the pleading and the vituperation, the smell of fear and vomit. Anger and despair clog your nostrils like burnt toast. A mass culling would never be this disorganised normally, nor this loud and urgent: it would be a lonely corner of the culling pit and a troll on their knees, being read the declaration. This looks more like Her Imperial Condesce’s wiggling-day party.

Your target is a rustblooded troll hooked to the far end of the waiting-frame. He is shouting. Gamzee is all tense and tight beside you, unbreathing, still, and you find yourself reciting the words as tightly as any of the other hurrying teams: “By the power vested in me as the unrighteous claw of the Empress!” you say, spitting each word out like bullets, “I will remove -- ”

Your troll is a runner! He decks you upside the head with his cuffs and bodychecks Gamzee and he takes off. After a moment’s seeing stars you give chase: sliding your sword from your cane and sweeping the blade over the backs of his thighs, slashing but not severing the tendons there. The movement opens up the clotted weals on your back, but never mind, as it’s enough to make your target tip over. You intend a quick slash to the throat or the heart, the brain through the eye, anything quick and relatively painless that means Gamzee could give the corpse a quick thump and satisfy test requirements, but --

But as it turns out your Subjugglator partner places one foot on the cull’s chest and he goes to town. A lot of things happen very quickly, first and foremost Gamzee putting his foot -- through -- the cull’s chest, and then his club comes down, and -- then the body, lifting it by the hair and horns, and -- there is a _rrrrrrip_ sound that reverberates throughout the cullpit, a percussion counterpoint to the yells and the argument. You have never seen anyone do that to a corpse, not even in a movie. The head comes off like a bean plucked from a vine. Gamzee is all red! Gamzee is all tense and tight and silent, still, his chest all red, heaving for each breath.

Then he smiles at you, slow and private, as though you now both share a secret.

  


You have to pull him away because he won’t stop staring at the body, the red splatter on him being the same red splatter on you. He won’t put down the awful feathery-necked head and when you go to hand back your high-vis spots, the subjugglator officer says, “Pass,” in a tone that says he is faintly impressed. You are having to lead Gamzee by one arm. You take his wrist and tug him outside the cullpit cathedral and then you shake him hard, like you are trying to wake him up. You are.

“Gamzee!” What do you even say? “Gamzee -- Gamzee, you cannot take a head away, that’s unhygienic. Gamzee! It is getting stuff everywhere.”

He looks at the head. He looks at you. He beholds the head again, as though in fond contemplation. “That’s it,” he says, so quietly that you barely hear. Trainees cluster in on all sides of you, the impatient people still in line, the exam-finishers pushing past covered in the sweet stink of relief. “That is it, wicked sister.”

“Gamzee -- ”

“All I ever had to do was let go,” he says, and he raises the head so that he can look at it directly in the still-cooling eyes. For a very awful moment you think he is going to kiss it. This is a dumb idea; instead he tosses it indolently over his shoulder to land in the middle of the line, where it splatters a couple of trainees and causes mass howls of disgust. Before you can apologise to them on behalf of your partner, who just threw a head, he seizes both your wrists so hard your joints pop.

“Mr. Makara,” you say, and ask him the stupidest question: “Are you _okay?”_

Oh, he will never be okay, not ever again! He looks at you as though he has found God stuffed down the back of his diurnal rest platform, alight with revelation. No pain. You have learned he is actually a little too proud to show you pain. His eyes are orange with tiredness and burst ocular cells, his grip is too hard. “I’ll up and tell you the secret that nobody knows,” he says, “The joke’s in how I mother fucking _contain_ the knowing in my own fucking self, still untold as all hell,” and he lets out a low peal of laughter.

This does not make the slightest squirting shit of sense. You must look grieved; when he reaches up to touch your face it is in that awful gentle rub of a _shoosh._ Further parts of you are destroyed. “Oh, fuck, Terecita, it was so fucking _easy,_ did you see them shit their miserable god damn drawers? Did you see it pass through their _thick addles?_ I got the WICKED UNDERSTANDING, PYROPE, his meat’s my meat, his meat’s your meat, in this kickin’ miracle we’re all -- just -- meat -- ”

You realise he is burning pure adrenaline and probably hysteria. He lets out a _whoop, whoop!_ , and a few other subjugglators waiting in line take up the chant. Everyone likes a good _whoop, whoop!._ Then Gamzee seizes you close and he whirls you around, once, twice, manic, and he waltzes you down the rest of the hallway. Everyone looks at you as though you are both weird.

And for stupid reasons, you are very sad.  
  


* * *

  


The examination nights are some of the longest in your life. You get through them by dint of bloody-minded determination, coupled with overfamiliarity of the texts; an overfamiliarity which nearly costs you, as you lick the questions delicately through your screen and become discombobulated by their simplicity. You second-guess yourself. Due to your internal smelloscope the schoolfeeders place you in a room all by yourself -- the other students have argued that you could smell what they were writing, which flatteringly overestimates your abilities -- and you cannot read the room. All you have is the sweat of your own tension, your own words, your own self-laid traps as you doubt that it could ever be this easy.

You inevitably finish each exam early. You spend the rest of the allotted hour fiddling with your answers -- all boring black, as you have all been threatened with broken digits should any of you answer even _one_ word with a typing quirk -- and you are demented with anxiety and the bleak greyness of the room. How did Gamzee do? Which questions did Gamzee answer? You imagine him in the large lecture theater where he is taking his tests, in a sea of dark heads and clacking keys.

Cheating is dealt with harshly. You hear that one girl is dragged from Court Law by grim-faced officers, caught with a tiny connection feed chip stuck at the base of one horn. Zero for the paper and two black eyes: the black eyes are nothing compared with that zero. The chances of her and her partner scraping up a seventy-percent now are tight.

You watch Gamzee closely for signs of breakdown. Nothing. Blankness! He is simply discontent and distracted. “Dunno,” he says, when you interrogate him for post-exam harrassment. He is worse when prodded in detail: “Which question was question fucking eight? Question eight the one all slapping me in the face with culpability of... some shit? Inherent moirail guilt? Damn, how’s question eight even know to ask a thing like that?”

He drawls it out, _daaaamn,_ a ludicrous self-parody. Sometimes if you did not know better, you would assume he was fucking with you.

The sparring practical is divided by cohort. On the bright side, this means you cannot work yourself into a lather craning to see how Gamzee is doing. On the downside, this means you cannot work yourself into a lather craning to see how Gamzee is doing. You wonder how he is doing in Scripture, which has some kind of verbal component (prayer? Long-distance whooping? You have _no fucking idea)_ that you’re not privy to. You are nearly tempted to catch a subjugglator’s arm and interrogate, but are cowed with the appearance of dark-eyed Velher in the hallway who answers before you can ask.

“Teach, you must be a _slave_ to his education,” she says in passing, and her cronies laugh.

What does that even mean? In what way is she taunting you? Could her shit get any more oblique?

The examination nights are long and the sleep hours short. You should have been having fun; talking loudly in hallways dismantling each question in a misleading manner, psyching out others mid-exam by bringing rustly objects and rustling them as hard as you could. You learned the art of a mindfuck from Vriska Serket at each FLARP tourney, and you had once looked forward to practicing the art elsewhere. _No dice!,_ as she might say. You do the exams alone and then you fret alone. You walk silently with Gamzee corridor to corridor, the way two people might when they have nothing to say yet nobody but each other.

Class is cancelled as the examinations are marked. The General and the Exarch make good use of trainee labour and have you all scrub down the briefing rooms, despite the fact that there are perfectly good cleaning-grubs to do so; you actually like the time spent on your hands and knees, listening to the subdued chatter as a host of young trolls wait for the results of their future. You yourself are resigned to the planet of Endless Contractable Infection.

Everyone is a strange mix of grave and giddy, all hopes and dreams and too long spent in this floating pressure cooker. There is an endless frenzy of macking: romance fungally spreads in the hole that studying left. The trainees are left alone in stuffy rooms, high on the fumes of cleaning fluid, and the outbreak of smooching, shooshing, and shanking is severe. Everyone suddenly finds each other irresistible. Once upon a time you would also have liked nothing better than to noisomely yell _WOO!_ at anyone you caught in passionate embrace, but even that simple comfort is denied you now.

Gamzee at least shares your ennui. You huddle an arm’s-length apart in the corridors, waiting for Trollian to beep when it never does, a scalemate squashed between you. The whole cohort basically assumes you’ve made your paletroth; you’re a popular ship. This hurts you in awful boring ways you have no care to examine.

“How badly _do_ you think you did?” you ask him baldly. Time has made you both blunt.

He just continues fussing with nothing on the knees of his trousers, looking at you as though looking at you is fatiguing. “You of little faith,” he says. “Little fucking faith in _you_ , Terecita.”

“Objection. You have previously used mock exam time to talk about how you want to kiss Tavros’s face.”

“Better use than _you_ made it.”

“I got a hundred percent -- ”

“ -- filling it up with bullshit rules, standing there with a knife in your paw and no thought in your nug trying to fight the great big goddamn black-hole miracle of the _universe,_ snorting stone-cold naïveté up each gaping-ass nostril -- ”

“When we get sent to the planet of the pus-seeping ocean,” you say, “I had better not spend two sweeps listening to you warble about entropy.”

For some reason, there is nothing more irritating than Gamzee Makara going off on one of his silly rants. There is also something impalpably uplifting about that irritation: clean, easy, hedonistic. He smiles at you indolently and flicks you the middle finger. This middle finger is so swift and brief you could not swear he actually gave it to you at all. It reminds you so much of Karkat that you are suddenly breathless, with missing him.

On the night that the examination results are posted, you put on your uniform like a suit of armour. You tidy your hair. You determine to go to your grave as polished as an apple. In the briefing-room, the General Advocate gives you all a brief and highly mistimed speech that nobody is listening to, one about what the next sweep’s training will serve and what awaits those who might be transferred off the _Executor_ \-- there is some mention of exciting times ahead in the realm of courtblock experiences, but nobody is listening. You must all to a troll look like constipated cholerbears, because in the end the Ecstatic Exarch cuts off Parlet’s speech with a wave and hijacks the volume grub.

“You all want to see how brutally we are disappointed in you, brethren,” she says, ignoring the Advocate’s repressive stare. “Get the fuck out of here.”

Stampede! You all pour out, rancorous and disorderly with impatience, a total free-for-all. You elbow and drub more than one soft belly in order to get to the results, fighting your way to the far end of the corridor. The hubbub is amazing. The priests will start throwing lachrymatory gas into the crowd if you do not watch yourselves. By the time you struggle to the end you are no longer so immaculate as when you rolled out of the sopor that morning, but you are there.

There is odd silence, at that end of the hallway. A muted breathlessness. Your name tops the list, your scores in matched array:

**TEREZI PYROPE (L)**

_CO. LAW -- 100%  
CU. LAW -- 100%  
INT. TO L -- 100%  
INT. TO RL -- 100%  
LOG/CON -- 100%  
PHYS -- 100%_

One hundred percent; some small measure of comfort to you. To your ego, anyway.

You get distracted by another name a little way down, whose final rank is indeed impressive:

**LINNEA VELHER (S)**

_CU. LAW -- 99%  
INT. TO L -- 99%  
INT. TO RL -- 99%  
SCRIP -- 100%  
SCRIP X2 -- 100%  
PHYS -- 99%_

You were right; she will go far, if she doesn’t end up on the wrong end of her own cahoots. Poor ill-fated Alehks is right out of the top ten, and you wonder what will become of him and his sub-audible fluthluhorn. Other names swim in and out of your sinuses: Kaddil, Aionah, none of which --

There is a name in-between yours and Velher’s, the second-ranked student. Since you hadn’t been looking for it, you missed it entirely. Nobody stops you when you tiptoe up to the results list and slowly, tremblingly, drag your tongue across the top.

**GAMZEE MAKARA (S)**

_CU. LAW -- 100%  
INT. TO L -- 99%  
INT. TO RL -- 100%  
SCRIP -- 100%  
SCRIP X2 -- 99%  
PHYS -- 100%_

In formal terms, you lose your fucking shit.

  


“Gamzee!” you shriek, beyond words. “Gamzee. _Gamzee._ **Gamzee!** _How?_ Reveal your secrets, every single one! I will drub you! Oh my _God,_ you magnificent grapeberry bastard, how did you pull this off, how did you -- you -- ”

“Ninety-nine in Double Scripture?” he says, peering at the list. “That is god damn BACKWARDS-ASS SHIT, right about there. Chaplain’s got it in for me, I do not even fuckin’ front.”

You wrap your arms around him and you do a little jig on the spot. “Gamzee, we’re not going to the planet of devouring rat people! We’re not going to Shitpail Planet, or Skullfuck Planet, or Monster Truck Planet, or any of the other planets I made up but probably weren’t that far off the mark! I don’t understand, _how?_ You are possibly brilliant! How?”

“They’re just fucking _words,_ wicked sister,” your subjugglator tells you, all-mixed up contempt mollified with triumph. He holds his arms at awkward angles as though not knowing what on Alternia to do with them, or you. “Spit them back out so they get wet and repetitive, motherfucks call it a miracle. Meaningless shitty drivelspittle all slammed out your god damn notes like the most atonal fucking rap. Only took a day to memorize, they don’t make you nug up and _think.”_

You haphazardly file away the implications of this. You are too busy bouncing up and down on the balls of your feet, wrapped up in his midsection and breathing in indigo like champagne. “Motherfucking _bitchtits,”_ you say, and you are giddy as a hummingbeast. Anger and elation sit side by side, strangely overlapping bedfellows, and you lower your voice: “How could you put on that stupid act the whole time?”

Gamzee peels you off him a little, and he tugs on your hair so that you are looking up at him sightlessly. “Aw, girl, I never acted stupid,” he breathes. “You’re just _MOTHERFUCKING BLIND.”_

All around you, people are beginning to offer their congratulations -- rather sickly, bewildered congratulations, for the most part. It all washes over you. It’s unreal. What a long way it is from _probably thinks they’ll let her do the exam for him_ to _congratulations, Teach -- nice fake-out, Makara -- do you think you’ll stay on the Executor, do you want to go with the legislacerator corp or the Church --_

“Congratulations,” says a voice, and you recognise the velvet horrorsong of Trainee Velher. “However _did_ you both motherfucking do it?”

You feel Gamzee sling his arm around your shoulder, big hand draped over your midsection. You smell the same bunched-up tension in him that you did the day of the culling practical. For a moment you’re concerned, but his smile is big and wide and white just like they were before the sopor wean; just like, only their easy sweetness is gone. You realise those smiles are most likely extinct. “Aw, sister, wasn’t even a thing,” he drawls aloud. “Couldn’t have fucking done it without my fake-pale pal all putting her fear of God out of me. Guess I was just too pan-rattled dumb before she came along, bowling ball didn’t have shit in it, rolling around all empty noise -- ain’t that _goddamn truth,_ Terecita?”

  


This spoils all your joy. You cannot even say, _Gamzee, you mixed up the idiom_ \-- you think about the hug and you are flushed blue with shame and anger, the one arm holding you to him now a shackle. A noose. A hot thrill of miserable rage runs down your spinal cord, and you shrug him off with all the dignity you can muster before sidling into the crowd. You know he’s following you through hunch, if not his movements; you duck into a side corridor and there he suddenly is in a flash, a blur of black movement.

“Do you want a free hit?” you say. “I will give you a free hit!”

“Thought you’d be happy, baby girl,” he says, and his mouth is now a humourless slash. “Thought I’d made all your dreams up and come true.”

“Thank you for not allowing us to take the route of the devouring rat people. I am very grateful. My gratefulness sac is fit to burst. You never did it for _me,_ Gamzee!”

His eyes shine. “You wanted me to do it for you?”

“No, I -- ”

“Do you think I do mother fucking _anything_ in my goddamn existence for _you,”_ he says, and he takes another loping step forward. That gelatinous, oozy way he moves is now with intent, all the necessity in it you ever could have wanted. “Do you think I _roll out my slime_ in the evening all up for the purposes of one skinny-assed, know-it-all legislacerator? You think I’m _yours?_ Do you even know your own blasphemes?”

“I didn’t -- ”

“I am mother fucking _one nubby-horned brother’s only,”_ he says. “My one, my only, my mother fucking _all.”_

He is very in love with Karkat. This has struck you over and over, and yet you’re surprised each time. Your seedflap is filled with acid, and you cannot curb your tongue: “Well, he is definitely wearing out his husktop typing to you.”

“Like he’s made motherfucking letters and spaces at _you_ and your reek-ass desperation -- ”

“Go back on sopor!” you say, and you are wild. “You can. You don’t have to do anything else. I’ll take care of y -- I will do the talking and the words and the work, I know you’re capable of it and I have learned my lesson! Look at how thoroughly schoolfed I am. You don’t have anything to prove, Mr. Makara, you can go _back.”_

Your tall subjugglator partner takes another step towards you, then two. You note dimly that he is going through a growth spurt. His horns show the new red bands of keratin at the base and his shaggy hair badly wants a trim, and he has that badly-constructed, frondy look of someone who is shooting up faster than his skin can match. Your own spurt is progressing much slower: you will never catch up, where height is concerned. Gamzee looks at you with irises as dark and blue as plum-slurry jam, and for a moment his expression flickers. For a moment he looks at you as though he is a question and you are an answer, an inexorable needing, and then that is gone and he is remote as a chunk of ice hurtling through space.

“Girl,” he says, “Girl, _girl,_ you don’t -- go -- back.”

This is true.

“I took thirty stripes for you.” Gamzee doesn’t answer. “I take it that is not enough!”

You see him run his ashy tongue over his teeth, as though in contemplation. “One free hit.”

“One free hit,” you agree.

Your mouth is a hard tremble. Inside your chest your bloodpusher burns, hammering against your ribs as though it means to splinter them and break away, and the sense of loss is as acute as the sudden sense of abhorrence. There is a familiar _pop!_ of ozone as he pulls a weapon from his specibus, and you remember that his is _jokerkind_ because there is your own dragonhead cane-sword in his hands. It looks ridiculous when he holds it, diminished, somehow. Without taking his eyes off you he begins to slide the blade out of its handle, a long low oily rasp --

“Excuse me,” says Brigadier-General Advocate Parlet.

You both jump. The cane-sword is whipped away into his strifekind. Both of you sort of scramble to stand next to each other and snap your hands up in salute, the same sickly smile matching your mouths as you address the Advocate. Her clean-boned, dapper face does not look particularly anxious. In fact, she looks caught between indulgence, embarrassment and an eye-roll, all filtered through her usual severe expression. “Am I interrupting, trainees?” she says.

“Nope,” says Gamzee.

“Not at all!” you agree.

“Not one motherfucking bit,” he says.

“We were roleplaying,” you say. “We were roleplaying people who -- who are unprofessional in corridors.”

The look that the Advocate gives you is plainly: _stop digging._ “I vetted your examination marks,” she says. “Just as expected, Pyrope. Subjugglator, unexpected but pleasant. I would stay away from the staffroom, though, as most of your schoolfeeders have expressed the desire to murder you. But you are this cohort’s honour achievers, so I give my congratulations.”

She is holding a tablet in her arms, and she drums her fingers briefly across it. “As I was trying to say in my speech before the Exarch decided in all her benevolence to cut me off,” she says, “we have an excursion for your cohort. We thought it would be enlightening for you all to run and oversee a treason trial. The case is cut and dry, but it will be a good chance to practice protocol.”

Some of your stress melts away. “A mock trial or a legitimate trial, sir?”

“Legitimate. We will be bringing his Honourable Tyranny aboard to give judgement, and you’ll have a legislacerative executor team to cull.” Excitement abounds! “Normally this would _not_ go to anyone not Cruellest Bar, but as the accused isn’t an officer the Highjudge Advocate General has made allowances. As a matter of treasonous heresy, the Grand Highblood has also sent word that he thinks the experience would be educational. You and Makara get prosecution.”

You look at Gamzee. He gives a minute, careless shrug, but you think you see a glimmer of interest. You do not even bother hiding your grin; to you this is beautiful news. You are so filled with glee that you half-forget you’d ever been angry and sad, and you hold out your hand for the tablet. “Here’s your case,” says Parlet, who is smiling very slightly at your enthusiasm. “Court begins session in a week. Do your research, the both of you.”

Both you and Gamzee crane curiously to look at your accused.

  


  


Fuck.

  
  



	4. ACT ONE, CHAPTER THREE

**ACT ONE:**

_Justice Lies Awake_

**CHAPTER THREE**

* * *

  


  
\-- gallowsCalibrator [GC] has begun trolling arachnidsGrip [AG]! --

GC: VR1SK4  
GC: WH4T H4V3 YOU DON3?

\-- arachnidsGrip [AG] has blocked gallowsCalibrator [GC]! --

  


* * *

  
It is the first time you see Gamzee Makara break down.

 _Really_ break down, you mean: this makes every other breakdown he’s had look like a wiggler’s tantrum, crying for meat pap and their lusus. The moment you hustle him back to his quarters he takes the tablet and sails it across the room in a splatter of glass. He raises his fist and slams it down on the desk like a meteor strike, leaving a web of cracks radiating out from a huge dent. He kicks his recuperacoon so viciously that it lets out a sad _glorp_ , bubbles of sopor rising to the surface and bursting, and then he proceeds to trash the rest of his room.

“Gamzee!” you say. He doesn’t answer. “Gamzee, we do not have the time for this. It would also be exceptionally foolish to give away our relationship to the accused -- ”

There is not a lot to trash. What scattered possessions your partner has are few. He shreds a sad little horn pile, he bends a silly one-wheeled-device into acute angles, he rakes his claws down aimlessly painted walls. You hear a tinkle as he smashes the sink in his ablution block. You’re quick enough to slip his husktop into your modus -- he’ll be wanting that -- but otherwise you stand and smell the pandemonium like an idiot, your mouth full of teeth. You only realise how deep his loss of control is when he advances on _you._

The fight is short. You duck out of the way as his punch smashes the wall behind your head; you roll away again as he makes a grab for you, snatching only a few strands of hair. Close-quarter fighting; his long, abominable reach is no good here. Before you know what you’re doing you slam the butt of your cane hard behind each of his knees; as he crumples you whip out the legislacerator’s second-best-friend and you cuff his hands. You chain him to his own desk chair before he rips the bolted base right out the floor, and then you tangle the cuffs around the recuperacoon railing in a fit of desperation. 

When he is secure you take out your legislacerator’s first-best-friend and noose his kicking legs, tying him up like a squealing oinkbeast. His foot catches you under the chin and drives your teeth up into your palate, but you get the knots done. There he struggles: claws driving into his palms and teeth driving into his tongue, an animal out of its mind with pain.

If you’d thought that would do the trick you are contender for the crown of being Superlatively Wrong. The cuffs bite at his wrists as he thrashes anew. You drag his chair upright and sit at his desk and you try to unruffle, to focus on scavenging what data you can from the tablet -- the image behind has already leaked but the text is still sniffable, so you grab the connector worm from your partner’s husktop and plug it in.

_“ -- find a motherfucking jank-ass pail and fuck yourself, you miserable motherfucking affront -- ”_

All the while he lets out a stream of gross invective and calls you names. Some of them are uncreative; others, moreso. Many of the things he promises to do to you would make the Exarch blush with pride. You cannot care. You are too eaten up with worry as you watch him bash himself halfway to death, straining and struggling -- at one point he calls out for Tavros, and at another point Karkat, just Karkat, and at that point you are really afraid. Gamzee is beside himself. To be honest, so are you.

You do not know what impulse drives you to watch him, the floor adrip with his blood, his grape-ringed eyes rolling back in his head as he subsides to mere frothing. If you took him to the medic, he would probably kill the doctorturer. If you took him anywhere you aren’t sure that he wouldn’t kill everyone he encountered, starting with his hands squeezed around your neck.

Poor fool you! You have never wanted to touch him so much as you do now. You have to sit on your clammy hands with wanting to soothe him, wanting inanely to pap your hands against his cheeks and see if he will calm. This urge is usually tucked away in the shame cortex of your thinkpan where it belongs, but now it surfaces like a drowned corpse bobbing to the surface. You are worried about what would happen if you do, and you are frankly worried about what will happen when you don’t.

Indigo trickles down from his temples, matting the back of his hair where he smashed his backpan into the rail. Every so often he will spit out a big glob of bloody saliva to the floor, strewn with smashed horns and bits of one-wheeled-device, and let out a wet throaty _honk._ His eyebrows and lashes are crusted-up. His paint is smeared over his long, square-chinned face, blistering especially at the sides of his seedflap. Nothing languid about him now: every movement is a spike of energy, frantic, subsiding into stillness before his muscles explode into action again.

_“ -- gonna wrench off your hands at your self-satisfied sinner’s wrists -- ”_

“I know, Mr. Makara.”

_“ -- flay your fucking throatchute inside out -- ”_

“I _know.”_

This carries on without reprieve. You study the case file back to front until you can’t bear to see Tavros Nitram’s puzzled, resigned face staring up at you any more. The details are pitiful: they were written out by some anonymous legislacerator whose face you’d dearly love to smack, because their sloppiness is apparent and offensive. Someone out there thinks that a brownblood heresy case is ample cause to skimp on detail! Can you really blame them, tasked with minutiae for a training-ship’s practice hanging?

Of course you can. That is not how justice works. Behind you the whimsical details of what Gamzee will do with your dead body blur into noise, not sound, and you log into his Trollian.

\-- terminallyCapricious [TC] began trolling twinArmageddons [TA]! --

TC: T4VROS H4S B33N 4RR3ST3D  
TC: 1 W1LL NOT 1NSULT YOUR 1NT3LL1G3NC3 BY PR3T3ND1NG YOU DONT KNOW 4BOUT 1T  
TC: M3SS4G3 M3 4S4P R3G4RD1NG WHO YOU T4LK3D 4BOUT >:[  
TC: PS TH1S 1S OBV1OUSLY G4MZ33  
TC: HONK HONK HONK B4BYG1RL M4M4C1T4 DUMB N1CKN4M3S FOR T3R3Z1 1 4M FULL OF SM1RKS OR NOT C4R1NG 4BOUT 4NYTH1NG OR GO1NG COMPL3T3LY 4P3SH1T 4T 3V3RY UPS3T B3C4US3 MY 3MOT1ON4L 1Q 1S L1K3 Z3RO 4ND 1 DONT G1V3 4 SH1T!!!!  
TC: WHOOP WHOOP!!  
TC: OH 4S 4N 4S1D3 W3 H4V3 C4NC3LL3D GO1NG TO TH3 PL4N3T OF D3VOUR1NG R4T P3OPL3  
TC: 1T W4S 4 S1LLY PL4C3

You rest your head in the crook of one elbow, just so that if and when he answers you will know immediately. You are just resting, is all. It is not as though you could fall asleep with the racket going on in the background. Because you are not looking at what you are typing, it allows you to speak foolishly:

TC: MR C4PTOR 1 W1SH 1 H4D TOLD YOU TH1NGS TH4T 1 H4D PUT OFF T3LL1NG YOU

How you really fall asleep, sitting up at a desk with a noisy subjugglator decrying your continued offense to him by living, you have no idea. Yet when you startle yourself awake it is dark -- the motion sensors have dimmed the lights, thinking all occupants of the room have left or are not doing work requiring light. The husktop clock indicates hours have passed. The only signifier that this is not some sort of bad dream -- that this is the night before, and you’ve crawled into Gamzee’s room to miserably wait out examination results -- is the schedule of the _Executor,_ announcing incoming docking of a security skiff. Tavros.

The room is dark and smothery and silent, and you have left your prisoner pinioned to a rail with his feet tied up. Gamzee should be kept tied up approximately three hours of each day to teach him a lesson, but you feel like shit anyhow.

“Gamzee!”

He doesn’t answer. His head droops to his chest, bloodied, head sticky and hair stiff. Blood has driggled down in thick clots and smears over his forehead. He is very still. Before your brain knows what your legs are doing you go to him, dreamlike, leaving your chair and shuffling forward on your knees. You tilt back his awful familiar face and stroke over his hair, filled with a longing so contemptuous you cannot even bear yourself, your fingers at his homely jaw too shooshy for anyone’s good. You sniff the sweet bruisy shadows of his closed eyelids, and for a moment you think he is dead.

“Mr. Acceptably Grape Faygo,” you say. “Tavros is going to be here soon.”

Those eyes crack open, oily yellow. “Sopor.”

“What?”

His voice sounds as though he has been gargling gravel. “Get me sopor.”

You very nearly pap him. In the end, you look at his curd-white paint stains, his wounded welty mouth, and you don’t; you recall the aching stripes on your own back, which tend to help your priorities. “You cannot want me to dope you again.”

“This is the last motherfucking time.” Each word is heavy. What you’d thought of as calmness is the end of his control. “Sopor. Just a smidgen. If you don’t I am going to snap every miserable brittle little neck that locked him up, scourging sister, and you will smell as I make the blood rain from the hallways like _wicked precipitation.”_

Once you would have laughed, but you took him right into the killing room and introduced him to the art of taking lives. “Please. After all this time, do you really think I would let you run riot?”

“Oh, legislacerator, you gonna up and _STOP ME?”_

There is a funny gleam to him. You do not quite like to look, burning with a humiliation that makes your reactions slow. “This is stupid. This is demented! The sopor was always a fool’s game. There’s got to be some other way.”

“You ever been the type of angry where it’s hot?”

Something in his voice makes you both stop. Gamzee’s lids shutter closed again. His eyelashes are short and stubby and very dark, and his expression is clear, clean somehow. “Like you swallowed down a sun and choked halfway and you feel it there, this hot ball, all waiting for my little motherfucker peristalsis -- and it’s burning all the way down, _crisp_ angry, _dry_ angry. When people talk all you hear out their stupid god damned banal squawkblisters are horns and screams, and you’re the type of angry where you know there is a God, this is God, and God has had enough of _EVERYONE’S SHIT?”_

Both of you stare each other down. You unfurl your hands from his head and you clutch your own elbows instead, as though you are afraid you will touch him again. Disappointment pats you over-familiarly on the butt: your touch does not calm Gamzee Makara.

“Cowardice,” you say, voice surprisingly even. “I bet you never let any feeling run its course in you. Every time you can’t handle _hurting,_ will you run to sopor? I know a runner when I see one, Subjugglator! Sopor is not a good moirail.”

“You try to feed me any of that poison again after this I will bury you,” he says. Gamzee’s words are too careful, uneven. You can see the tic at his jaw. “You know runners from looking in your motherfucking MIRROR EACH EVENING, don’t you motherfucking just?”

“You unaccountable douche! Don’t you _dare_ tell me you know me -- ”

“Aw, girl, you think I fucking _want it?_ You think I’m an addle-nugged addict? You’re fucking right and you’re mother fucking _WRONG._ Get me a mouthful. Just a scoop. Ain’t in a begging frame here, not one iota of beg is passing through my system.”

In desperation you say, “It’s raw and full of denatonium; it’s going to taste appalling.”

“Terezi. _Does a troll up and look like he gives a_ SINGLE REEKING TURD?”

You get off your knees and scoop out two fingersful of his recuperacoon, which is unhygienic in the extreme, and you reluctantly kneel down beside him again. “Yeah, shit, that’s more than enough,” is all he says, but he does not change the dose. The sopor is a wet bright lime streak on your fingers and you force open his jaw, clutching his chin, and you scrape them over the back of his lingual twitcher. You do not do this entirely out of frustrated unkindness. Even after a few days through his recuperacoon’s filtration system, the sopor will be bitterer than sin and probably enough to make him gag. You are not interested in him gagging with your unprotected fingers between his lips.

Gamzee’s lips close over your digits and he sucks once: tentative at first, and then the old addict in him speaks and he sucks again, harder. His lingual twitcher shamelessly laves every last scrap of sopor slime off you, seeking between and beneath and scraping itself under the clawbed: his mouth is cool and his twitcher is wet, tracing ticklish lines up each joint as his gaze flicks up to you.

You both realise that he is tied up oinkbeast-style and suckling at your fingers, throat a hard greedy swallow, and it gives you mutual pause. His teeth ring around the base of your fingers and he _bites._ When you snatch them away they are wet and beringed with his toothmarks, swiftly beading up teal, so you wipe them on his shirtfront just to show him who is boss. He just raises his eyebrows very indolently in a way that gives you whole-body embarrassment.

“We have around ten paltry-ass minutes of my pan working the way it goddamn ought to,” he says, sounding more coherent than he has for quite a while. Perhaps more than he ever has; Gamzee is tight with unusual urgency. “So deliver unto me my fucking details. What lie did they take my boy down for?”

Now you are almost one unit again, like the last twenty-four hours never happened. You decaptchalogue a key and start working at his cuffs, leaning over to unlock him with practised deftness. “Mr. Cinnamon was caught with files way out of his clearance. Schema of the Empress’s flagship. Info on some of her highlords. Cultist propaganda, doomsday device blueprints, weapon queries, historical apostasy, pre-Alternian territory intel -- if he did it, this is sewn up, it is indefensible.”

Gamzee hisses a slow breath out of his fangs. As you reach over for his other wrist you note, distantly, that some of your blood is on his front teeth. “He didn’t motherfucking do it.”

To tell the truth, you also don’t think Tavros Nitram did it, motherfuckingly or otherwise. Parts of your pan shift like tectonic plates to a much more desirable topic, throwing up strata of info, trying to mount argument. _Cut and dry,_ the Advocate had said, and the Brigadier-General is not one to lightly call a case. But your gut instincts call for Tavros’s innocence; all your gut instincts also call for conspiracy.

“If that is the case,” you say, “then we go with my plan. We find him not guilty.”

 _“Guilty until proven guiltier,”_ he rattles off, quite impressively for someone with a mouthful of sopor in his belly. _“Whosoever of the Mother’s bloods, within Alternia or without, compasses, imagines, invents, schemes, plots, devises or intends to deprive or depose Her Imperious Condescension the Empress, or her quadrantbearers or highlords, from all due Her and her Terrible Dominion -- ”_

“Gamzee.”

_“ -- within any part of Alternia or territory both owned by Her or yet to be inevitably owned by Her, to move or stir any alien to befoul Alternia and its forces or any such other of Her Imperious dominions, levies war, blasphemy and offense -- ”_

“Gamzee!”

_“ -- or declares such compassings, imaginings, inventions, schemings, plottings, devices and intentions through any means, will be tried in court and destroyed utterly forthwith.”_

“Yes! You can recite the _Law Of High Treason!_ I can quote it as well!” Probably not with such thoughtless accuracy. You are beginning to suspect that Gamzee is not an audacious genius of study and reasoning, but an audacious genius given an unfair gift. “This will _not_ be carried out like your usual high treason trial, clever clogs. The Imperial Condesce will not sign the order. The consequences are altogether different!”

This makes him hungry with awful hope. “Like fucking _what?”_

“He will not be shackled and burned slowly alive, he will get an ordinary rope hanging -- _Subjugglator.”_ At that he is scrubbing his newly-freed hands together and cursing, the room darker than ever. Your bloodpusher trembles. “Do _not_ chucklevoodoo me, I am only trying to help. I will not direct an innocent troll to the noose.”

“Tavbro didn’t do shit and you know it,” he says, “to nobody, never fucking ever. Boy would nurse a fly with its wings all in a ripped place and nurse that mother fucking flyless fly back to buzzing -- innocent as the _god damn baa-lamb,_ you fathom my slam?”

“Please don’t rap at me,” you say doggedly. “This is a trying time, but it is not trying enough for rap. If he is innocent I will find him innocent.”

Gamzee’s gaze goes to you. The popped, exhausted orange is gone from his oculars but this somehow makes his look more terrible, colder, contained. “That the case?” he says softly. You move away and perch yourself on top of his chair again, maintaining distance. “Case is that you sniff guilt from my longhorned brother’s pores you up and gladly _WATCH HIM DANGLE?”_

“Yes,” you say.

“Guilty by whose brainless, stinking rubric?”

“Justice’s,” you say.

You wonder what would have happened if you had answered _Imperial law_ instead of your most honest and bad-ass answer. Gamzee stretches himself up liquidly against the wall, popping stiff joints and cracking his knuckles, and he looks at you with his hooded huckleberry eyes.

“I love him with the fury you have never loved single specks of bullshit,” says Gamzee distantly. “I love him like black holes love the light. I love him like the laughsassin loves the last wet chuckle of a slit chokepipe. I pity that brown-blooded fucker of mine until the final leaking death shit of the universe’s motherfuckin’ cooling corpse.”

Young redness! Such romance. You bite back the urge to say _I know! I know! I do know,_ which would have been humiliation itself and painful as the sound of crunching teeth. So you draw yourself up and you say, “I don’t actually care.”

He surprises you by nodding, as though this is an acceptable statement. With a gravelly honk he stretches out first one leg, then the other. “You think my boy has even the thinnest see-through slice of hope, wicked sister?” he says. “You think these trumped-ass motive-free charges on my wonderbro can get their flip on in a holy court of law?”

His voice is mocking, but the questions themselves are not rhetorical. “The beauty of the court is its duality,” you say. “Guilty _or_ innocent. Low odds of an innocence ruling does not mean innocence cannot exist. We do not _try_ the already-sentenced, Mr. Makara, we cull them.”

“You motherfucking believe that.”

“It is the truth.”

“Sometimes I think the iron claw of naïveté slit your throat the day you got hatched,” he says, and you scowl. Gamzee notices and laughs at you, looser, sweeter, the sopor already starting to burn its way into his digestion sac: “Oh, Terecita, don’t you motherfucking worry, I get you are _dirty with knowing_. You are impure with all the knowing you got going on. You just hurry and pour your plan into my willing aurals, you hit me with your shitty little rhythm stick.”

You tap your shitty little rhythm stick on the ground. You feel oddly queasy despite your smile. “My plan is: we shall indict the correct offender.”

  


* * *

  
There is already a festival air aboard the _Executor._ It will be two weeks before trainee outliers are given assignments worthy of them: whether sent to join legislacerative vessels and study early for the Cruellest Bar, taught hideous cacklechisms and canon law by bishops of the Church, or packed off to Ugly Planet to live demeaned lives as military police. The rest will stay and enter another phase of training, sent out pair by pair to keep law, moral and order in the Alternian empire.

No classes, then; they’ve been replaced by protocol briefings. Everything is suddenly committees, committees, committees. Oversee-The-Drones-Build-The-Gallows Committee. Sate-His-Honourable-Tyranny Committee. Committee Of Bailiff Organisation. There is even a Prosecutorial Aide Committee, and you know this because they’ve sent you and Gamzee six memos in as many hours.

The attitude change is immense. Now that you and your subjugglator partner have recognised cachet, you have your hangers-on, and not all of them simply the Prosecutorial Aide Committee. Everyone is suddenly nice, smarmy, or making an effort at both. Your name is still _Teach Pyrope,_ but if they sneer it they do not sneer it to your face. Your other half is certainly no longer _that dumb-ass shit Makara._ He has been upgraded to _that fucker Makara_ by certain members of faculty, and the Advocate was right, because the next time the Comedic Chaplain sees him he gets harried down the hallway with a blowpipe.

You wish you could care more for the social implications. Your life is now partitioned into very short segments, with your illustrious future not a participating time slot! Six nights ‘til trial. Five nights til your prosecutorial brief is required by the Advocate; no need for a defense brief, as simply breathing ‘defense’ is cause for punishment through _Single Female Legislacerator_ episodes.

It is a very long jaunt across the ship, to the brig. Next to you your partner walks with a glazed expression and sometimes sniggers at nothing at all, stopping himself short when he makes a sound as though he wants to tuck it back inside him. He is still bloodied and beaten: you had wanted to tidy him up, wipe some of it away, but considering subjugglator dress code nobody gives his appearance a second glance. Members of your cohort give you nods in various spectrums of respectful, and you and Gamzee ignore them for very different reasons.

“I _can_ do this alone, you know,” you say, under your breath.

You know his answer already. His gaze is fixed. “Nah.”

“Then tell me you are up for this.”

“Body’s ready, wicked sister,” he says, “spirit’s just up and weak.”

The prosecutorial team enjoys one unquestionable right, which is the right of interrogation.

  


  


It’s been a long time since you’ve seen Tavros Nitram. Your earliest memories are of a soft-eyed, slightly doughy kid who liked short-sleeved button-ups and imagination games, awkward in a wet-palmed, well-meaning way. As a FLARP clouder he was prodigious! You were fond of Team Charge, and you were especially fond of Aradia, and you were even fond of Tavros and the sexy fairies plastered to his walls. You had to respect that much commitment to a sexy fairy.

“ _Symbolhight:_ Nitram,” says your accused. “ _Hatching name:_ Tavros. _Identification_ \-- ”

“Mr. Cinnamon! Reciting your I.D. is for _prisoner of war_ interrogation!”

“Oh,” he says, slightly crestfallen but not all that sorry. “Well, if you don’t mind I think I’ll keep going, because I don’t really want to say anything else right now, and also because -- well -- you’re not the boss of me, cop.”

Tavros now sits opposite, older, all the juvenile barkbeast fat gone. His arms and shoulders are pure cords of muscle from holding the lance of his office, chest similar, and he is gaunt-eyed instead of sweet-faced. His wrists are held out in front of him awkwardly. They are clamped together with chip-shackles that will detonate should he get out of specified range. Every so often he will rub his back furtively against the chair, a nervous habit and one that makes his horns dip; it is perhaps gauche to note but he has also grown a hell of a rack.

Damn. Your wigglerhood FLARP buddy is _very nearly_ good-looking, what with his silly floppy hair and his sleeveless cavalreaper vest, and behind you Gamzee is shy with awe. He lurks just behind your shoulder, squinting into the bright light of the interrogation lamp, hovering and unsure. He is profoundly stoned.

“I would like to plead _not_ guilty,” says Tavros, “on account of the fact that, in my opinion, I’m not guilty of much of anything, but I’d guess you’d want me to plead guilty. To make things more amenable. In your opinion.”

“You are being passive-aggressive, Mr. Nitram.”

“I don’t think,” the cavalreaper says, “you can blame me? I’d also like to know if I get a call, or a courtesy chat, and I’d like to know what happens to my lusus now, since I don’t think my lusus is accountable, for crimes.”

You say, “Are you to blame for anything?”

He tugs at the collar of his silly vest awkwardly. In the pause he looks up at you with very dark-ringed oculars, smelling of rich loamy dirt, and before you can get your hopes up that he will really talk to you he rattles off with another “ _Symbolhight:_ Nitram. _Hatching name:_ Tavros -- ”

“I give up,” you say. “I am going to adjourn, and let my bad cop take over.”

Tavros’s face clears anyhow, the only person in the entire universe glad to see that their legal team is Gamzee Makara, and they give each other matching dopey smiles. This is probably valve-warming to someone. Your accused raises his chained fist for a knuckle-bump and they dape each other, only you think that your partner’s knuckles linger just a little too long, and the expression on his face is excruciating.

“Bro, we’re gonna get you up and motherfuckin’ out of here,” says Gamzee. The _bad_ in _bad cop_ is a synonym here for _suck._ “They’re talking trash, they ain’t putting you away for this shit. They are empty skins of no value, they got lies in them, you think I’d leave my Tavbro to rot?”

“Gamzee,” Tavros says awkwardly, “you are my prosecution.”

It is a struggle, seeing him on sopor. Your subjugglator looks grave and affronted, as though this statement has tipped a pie down his pants. At least there’s that: on enough sopor, you know he doesn’t feel jack shit. “Fuck,” he breathes. “I am. _Damn._ Doesn’t motherfucking matter none, you didn’t up and do it, bars not gonna hold you, we’re gonna walk out...”

“Uh, I don’t think that’s the best scenario -- at this juncture -- um, at any juncture -- ”

“We are not walking out with _anyone,”_ you say, and you tap the desk with your cane. “But my colleague has raised an interesting point. How _did_ you receive heretical, conspiratorial contraband on your husktop, Private Nitram? And how did it come to have ‘TAVROS’ splattered over it in big black letters?”

“I didn’t know what they were,” he says, a little furtively. You smell the lie.

“There. Fuck.” Gamzee gives an artless shrug. “Brother didn’t know what it was, nug didn’t got the knowing of it, got to count for something.”

Either he is sillier on fresh sopor than you’d anticipated or he is being ridiculous on purpose. “Ignorance is _not_ an excuse,” you say, and you draw up a chair and sit on it. You turn it around so that you are straddling it backwards, which is a recognisable stance of solidarity. “An _excuse_ would be that, perhaps, that it can be proved the files got on his husktop by mistake -- not something I would investigate, considering that your name is on them, trainee -- or that the files were given to you by a superior. Someone whose rank was demonstrably above yours. An order you couldn’t turn down.”

Tavros is better than he used to be. There is no flicker of pupil, no indrawn breath, only the weaving of his fingers into each other above the cuffs. You can taste his light panic on the tip of your tongue, though: confused, peppery, bright. “Wait,” he said. “Tere -- legislacerator -- um, sorry, protocol -- you really want to get me _off?”_

You would love to make a dirty joke. As Gamzee says, “Hell, yes,” you somehow refrain and say, “I do not see the innocent hang, Mr. Cinnamon. Who sent you those files?”

His great horned head bows. He stares at the pockmarked surface of the desk and you simply watch, watch, watch, nose and ears open as you catalogue all minute shifts in muscle that indicate his unhappiness. Your partner surprises you by hauling his big lanky self up to sit on the desk, reaching out as though he wants to touch him -- Tavros starts, and Gamzee withdraws -- his voice low. “It’s chill,” he says. “Kick that wicked shit off your tongue like you don’t even motherfucking like it. This business is basically fake, my brother, we’re just here to intervene with the system being up in your grill, the system got _STINKING RAZORS IN ITS CHEWTRAP.”_

Not entirely drugged to the gunnels, then. Tavros does touch him now; just a little bit of his shirt, tugging, looking up at him in disquieted surprise. “Uh, so,” he said, “that was vehement, for you, as vehemency goes, not that I want to stop you expressing your creativity, but.”

“Private.” He is well-trained by now. He jumps to attention, big brown eyes back on you, mouth a tight line. “We merely want to know who gave you the files.”

“I don’t know.”

Aha! Finally, an answer. Maybe you and Gamzee aren’t as vile working in tandem as you’d thought. For a moment you were beginning to think he was seriously cramping your style. “Tavros, _please,_ devious untruth reeks as badly to me as ever. And that was not even devious.”

“It doesn’t matter, I don’t think, who gave me the files,” says Tavros, “I mean -- this is all really nice, and I believe you, but I’m not really sure if this is worth it, so I’d rather not.”

“I know you don’t truck with this propaganda bullshit, you got no schemes,” says your bad cop, hands curling into fists. “They are hanging you over my cold cooling dead-rigored body.”

“Yes,” you say, drumming your fingers on the back of your chair. “They would step over your corpse to knot the rope, so in this you are entirely correct. Would you like to offer any other helpful truisms, Mr. Makara?”

“Uh, Terezi -- ”

Irritation on your partner’s face is as familiar to you as breathing. It comes in a far-off flicker now, a numb annoyance. He says, “I’m in my zone, wicked sister.”

“What carrot on a stick do I have to offer you _now_ to get you to commit to this prosecution? I will go through my list of carrots, and I will go through my list of sticks!”

“Speaking of sticks,” he says. “Damn, did you know that there’s somewhere on your tiny body where, if a motherfucker were to jam one, if one got GOD DAMN JAMMED, he could make you a hilarious fucking puppet -- ”

“Uh, holy shit, _please_ don’t fight,” says your accused. He is flushed and wiggling one shoulderblade nervously against the back of his chair, then the other. “Over me. Or this. Or anything. Because I’m sort of in a jam here, and none of that’s assisting, if you don’t mind me pointing that out. Also, the things you are saying are horrifying, and also unhelpful, honestly -- Gamzee, are you okay?”

Your subjugglator partner responds better to him asking this question than he ever has to you. He passes one hand over his face and sighs into his palm, and when he talks he sounds more like his old self again. “Yeah, Tavbro, yeah,” he says, “got stress all up in my thinkpan over your _goddamn sitch_ but damn, ain’t it just miraculous, you being here?”

“I would kind of like better circumstances,” says Tavros. “Ones where I am not waiting to die. Those would be great, I mean that sincerely.”

“We’ll get you out of this, beat brother. Sincerity is streaming from my panholes right now, you get?”

“I get.”

“When I say you’ll get out of here that is a promise, a motherfucking surety, I love an illicit-ass joke but a joke this is not,” says Gamzee. “We’re going to un-jam this jam. Tell us who snuck you the files, brother, she can make this up and go away.”

For a moment you think he’s about to confess. His shoulderblades, which he was jiggling itchily against the back of the chair, still. You rise; you do not actually want him to spill the beans just yet, not even with your subjugglator safely high as a helium balloon. But with unusual fortitude all your subject says is, “I don’t know, uh, I really just don’t know. I don’t know who put them there and I don’t know what’s in them, and I guess that’s that.”

The strong light on his face highlights his hard stubborn chin, his tired eyes with those deep peat irises. The scent of him -- sweat and the clean clothes of two days ago, thin jailhouse protein slurry -- tells you the shape of his lie, but it also tells you the shape of his fear. A troll going to their gallows is afraid and desperate. His desperation rating is there but low, and he is more awkward and sad than he is afraid. Nervousness, not the misery of a man about to die.

“Do you understand that you might be dead soon, Tavros?” you say.

Gamzee gives you an expression as sour as denatonium, but you hold your hand up to silence him. The room is you and your accused cavalreaper. “Yes,” he says.

You sniff an important absence.

The guard knocks to shoo you out; you only get a half-hour of uninterrupted witness time. This is ostensibly in place so that an overeager prosecution doesn’t accidentally kill their accused, but for you it is just unwanted distraction. Gamzee reaches out to squeeze Tavros’s hand and there is a soft, awkward moment between them, though you have your suspicions Tavros’s softness is outweighed by his awkwardness.

“We will be back!” you say, when their hands are extricated.

“Thanks,” he says. “I do like seeing you, you know, I just sort of like seeing you less when I am tied up in an interrogation room. Like I said, about the different circumstances of seeing you, these are the circumstances I like least, and -- I’m sorry. And please investigate the Tinkerbull situation, if you could, I’d be grateful.”

Gamzee rests his hand palm-down on the desk in front of him. The expression on his face is strangely drawn, and it is the only time you have seen him visibly struggle against the sopor. It is a little bit tragic. He has to think about his words, and when they come out, there is only a very worrying truth behind them.

“Bro,” he says. “I will always COME THE MOTHERFUCK BACK FOR YOU.”

  


  


“He doesn’t think he’s going to die!” you say, after you have been unwillingly escorted out of the brig and are ensconced in your quarters. You nearly tapdanced down the corridors with impatience, bursting with the multiple pathways of possibility, Gamzee traipsing mindlessly alongside. The moment you lock the door he sinks down into your desk chair. “He didn’t think he was going to die _before_ we walked in, and he didn’t when we walked out. No urgency! What we said made very little bearing on him at _all,_ Gamzee. Do you know what this means?”

“Don’t give a fuck,” he says dreamily, and taps the press that lowers your chair. “You ain’t got to stir a rowdy scare up in his skull, sis. Shit will work out.”

“You are not springing him.” Gamzee doesn’t respond. He affably ignores your scowl, methodically making your chair shunt lower, lower, lower as he bonelessly drapes himself back. You stand over him. “I mean it. I do not condone unlawful activities, and I will hunt you down if you partake in them. This isn’t even necessary! Fight your silly slime, Mr. Makara, I know you have more opinions on this than apathy.”

“I probably did,” he agrees, “but then I stopped giving a shit about them.”

“ _Gamzee._ You asked me for a plan; I gave you one. Is there something about the concept of _wait and see_ that you find wanting?”

He pulls out a brightly-coloured ball from his modus and tosses it up in the air, leisurely, catching it one-handed and rolling it in his palm. Gamzee’s eyes track its progress, wholly committed to it and not you. “Dunno. Part where my motherfucker Tavros might not see nightlight again?”

“I am _not_ working to see him hang.”

“Aw, sister,” he says, softly, “so you up and let me make the back-up plan. It’s like, damn! The plan that comes after the first plan gets all sad at us. What’s the mad haps if we prosecute the real thing and they still put him to the rope, Terecita? Fuck do we do then? Fuck do we even do.”

“What _do_ we do?” you parrot, squeezing your cane between your fingers. “Break him out of the brig? What then? What kind of idiot breaks out a prisoner on a ship full of subjugglators? Where would we go, Mr. Makara, what would we do?”

The smile he gives you is wide and bright and mindless, tossing the ball up and away. You see the multicoloured crackle of his impractical modus absorb it back into subspace, glowing with all the detritus he keeps in it. “Baby girl, I feel a miracle coming,” he says.

“I know for certain you cannot be this high.”

“Gotta follow the faith wherever it hauls me, right?”

“Put your faith in _me!”_ You drub your cane lightly across one of his shins, hard enough to smart and hard enough to make you feel a little stress relief. “Can you not, for once in your ridiculous clown life, put your faith in _me?_ Am I not competent enough for your purposes? Do you not think that this is my actual arena, one that I legitimately study and not just memorise an info-dump on? This is a matter of law, not religion! And I am the law!”

He gives you a long, strangely meditative look. It is not the usual roll-eyes at your egotism, nor is it the amiable _sure, sis_ that he used to give you, which you are now suspecting was eye-roll in another form. Gamzee’s pupils are gigantic and his palpebral flaps keep drifting down, half-closed, never fully taking his gaze off you. “Let me take care of it,” you say. “He’s my friend too.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You my friend as well, scourging sis?”

You press the butt of your cane on the floor and you lean forward, braiding your fingers into each other, and you tell what you think is the unvarnished truth. It comes out awkward and ornate, difficult to say with any elegance. “I want to be your friend,” you say. “Many of the things I have done over the entire training period have been for you. Your benefit. Friendly motivations. You could even call them... friendivations.”

This is cause for no small amount of embarrassed fidgeting on the part of you both.

“So, uh, damn -- you _like_ me?”

Like a child of six sweeps would ask, wondering, ingenuous. It makes you stupid: “I would like to keep you from harm,” you say, which is overt as all hell.

“Know what I think shit warrants,” says Gamzee, “a fucking hug,” and then he hooks one foot behind your calf until you stumble. His long, grape-sticky arms come out to catch you and then he is pulling you into his lap, cuddling you into him, perched on his skinny thighs. The ways in which this is horrible are multitudinous. Your face is pressed right into his rib collection, smushed into his symbol. “Aw, sister, check out us getting our hug on, this is just precious as a lone bitchtit.”

His sweat smells faintly like sopor slime. He is pressing his fingers into your hair and sliding them around the back of your skull so that you are lulled into dumb optimism, wriggling up so that he can see your face. It is hard to breathe. This unbalances him from the computer chair and you go on a glacier slide out of it, him whumping on his back to the floor and you whumping after, his arms holding you like a safety belt. This serves to expel all air from your lungs and to make you cackle hysterically. His low, surprised laugh joins yours and there you lie: you on his long bony body, him flat on his back, and you are really very happy.

“That was not exceptionally smooth,” you tell him.

“Terecita, you ain’t _begun_ to see the smoothness I can get, no bumps up in my fucking business.”

This is the time. You decide to show your cards. The two of you were never actually made to snuggle, you’re all elbows and he has hips like lumps of steel, but the course of romance never did run smooth. You can’t believe this is literally happening. This is _such_ a bad idea. Gamzee reaches out and he carefully removes your glasses, making sure to not let any hair get caught in the hinges. He does not flinch at the featureless burnt-red globes in your sockets. He slides your glasses on his face instead, which looks ridiculous and somehow malevolent, before pushing them up high on his forehead. You smell crimson and cherry, your own sea-salt teal, sugar-sour indigo. Good colours, you think, a good combination of scent.

  


  


“Do you know,” he says, soft and wondering, “how hard that got, even on poison slop? Getting a load of him in cuffs, looking like a line of bad news. You got the inkling, right, girl?”

At that, oh, you just reach out to pap him. He lets you. The pad of your thumb traces down from his cheekbone, once, twice, three times as his eyelids flutter down. It’s so good. When the little furrows smooth out in his face you just want to kiss his mouth and kiss it furiously, which is not something you ever actually wanted before and is a thought you are still investigating for its horror quotient. But your thumb goes in for a fourth until --

\-- until he flips you over and pins one arm painfully behind your head. It happens very quickly. You never smell it coming, much less see it. Your much-abused backweals chafe open again, a familiar pain.

“Ha ha ha,” he says, voice like iron filings. No smiles now. “HA. HA. _HA._ That was a fucking good one, legislacerator, going to goddamn _laugh about it later.”_

“Gamzee -- ”

“You never did MOTHERFUCKING JACK FOR ME that wasn’t done for your _MOTHERFUCKING OWN SAKE,”_ he says. He may be all bones but he is heavy atop you, those hard hips pressing down into yours. You are not afraid. You are something else entirely. Ice runs through your veins. “What shit do you think you are pulling, baby girl? WHOSE SHIT ARE YOU YANKING THE FUCK OUT OF RIGHT NOW?”

You lie rigid beneath him. One thing that always gets you, each time, is his appetite for cruelty. You have heard the old trite saw of revenge being a dish best served cold; Gamzee’s vengeance is chunks of burning permafrost. His breath is cool and close, your mouth right next to his mouth, scents meshing and smearing alongside each other until you cannot see anything but his face. “One free hit,” he says, and he sifts his fingers through your hair before pulling out a small hank. “Freely given, freely taken. Don’t get sore at me, Terecita, you offered.”

You remain still as stone. Your subjugglator partner taps at the yellow striations of your horns, thumbs at your temples, pokes and prods at you idly. You somehow say, “Has your free hit ended?”

“Nah. Shit isn’t quite at completion.” Gamzee’s eyes are narrow and utterly unkind. So are his fingers. He chucks one underneath your chin, presses one to your lips in a mockery of _shh._ “You follow your plan,” he says, “I’ll deal. We swore an oath. Oaths got god damn sworn. But the moment it looks like gallows o’clock _I WILL UNLEASH FUCK,_ you hear me?”

“Loud and clear, Subjugglator.” You are an iron bar.

“Good.” He reaches down and he lays an awful, gentle parody of a pale kiss on your forehead. Gamzee’s mouth is softer than you had imagined. Your legs are all tangled up together and his body smothers yours, though yours feels made of iron weights. “Good. Now you quit this _hilarious motherfuckin’ pretense_ and hit’s over, over and done, we all filled up with revelation. Damn, I got some wicked starveling craves -- ”

The moment his body lifts you backhand him. The sound rings like a bell. You backhand him again. You both go rolling over and over until you knock into your recuperacoon, you on top of him, and you rise to your feet and you kick him right in the teeth. Gamzee launches himself up as well and spits a fang in your face, and both of you launch into an awful spat that is more about causing pain than death. You are both really starting to look like ruffiannihilator trainees, not recent graduates of legislacerator-subjugglator examinations. It ends with your noose laced around his neck and his club pressing you into the wall.

“When I offer you blood,” you tell him, tightening the knot, “I do not offer you humiliation. The contract was not for mockery. May we continue on as normal?”

Both of you are panting and wounded. Everyone is going to think -- your bloodpusher pangs hard! -- that you are one of those horrible kinky moirallegiances, the ones who sort of let themselves get hurt on “accident” so that the other has something to coo over. It could not be further from the truth. “May we resume our partnership as we were, in respectful disesteem?”

Another back fang comes out his mouth: a gross long molar. “All the disrespectful esteem you could ever god damn ask for, all of it you can eat,” he says, humourless and rope-burnt. “Sorry about your delicate motherfucking sensibilities. Can we quit the shit and go get some food now?”

“If anyone asks, we were sparring,” you say, still breathing hard. “No stories about walking into doors, say something believable. I am not having anyone start to gossip.”

“You poor dumb motherfucker,” says Gamzee contemptuously. “They already _talk, talk, talk_ their _GOD DAMN GUTS OUT.”_

Both of you stare at each other, although in your case it is more that you focus your nose on him and your blank gaze cannot really be aimed anywhere else. There is stultifying silence. You snatch your glasses back from their perch on his forehead, and you slide them safely on your nasal bridge where they belong. He removes the club from your gut, and you slip the rope from his neck. You tidy up your clothing. When the worst of the blood is wiped off you look at least halfway presentable. As he flicks an extra clot of blood from your hair your digestion sac still churns, but you are discovering this is how you both live -- you both amp yourselves up to a hundred and then slingshot back to zero, dancing in sine waves, not knowing the number of the perambulating unit that just hit you. 

How can you live this way? Because there is no other way to live with each other. 

“We have only a few more nights before our _real_ examination, Mr. Makara,” you say. “Can I rely on you to come down off the sopor without incident?”

“Only if I can rely on you,” he says, “to motherfuckin’ UP AND APPLY ALL YOUR SHIT to the sin that’s taking place, wicked sister, we are fucking functioning on a wing and a miserable prayer.”

“I will apply myself to the lawful utmost.”

“Then you got me.”

How can you live with each other? Because at the end of the night, you have nowhere else to go.

  


* * *

  
You and Mr. Makara go and sit in the mess hall for the first time in quite a long while, and you eat your slurries and are treated with sloppy deference by the rest of your cohort. People even call you over to their bench! You get particularly welcoming eyebrows over at Trainee Velher’s corner where she is holding court, but considering the filthy look her legislacerator’s still giving you this is not an avenue you should pursue.

With no class on communal nourishment can linger a bit longer, let everybody talk leisurely about the types of things you talk about over food. On the downside, this means you end up chowing down grubmeal with the entirety of the Prosecutorial Aide Committee, whose existence seems to revolve around your personal case notes and what beverages you would like present at the trial. 

There is much general talk of Tavros. Every so often you have to see how your partner is taking this, even still soporific, but he seems far more interested in seeing the bottom of a gruel-bowl before going back for more. You encourage him to do this and everyone smiles indulgently like this is cute, but in reality you are also hungry and want an equal amount of helpings. It has been such a long time since you’ve been hungry.

You needn’t have worried about people prying, with the wounds -- someone quips, _trouble in paradise, Teach?_ and everyone laughs like a dipshit. Ha ha ha! Even you. The parts of your pan not filled with the coming trial are filled with facepaint. You are sick of being unable to relax inside your own head. 

Talk washes over you: “ -- Advocate Parlet says some of the higher-ups are coming to watch so it’s all dress uniforms, but here’s _my_ question, why do the higher-ups want to come watch a game hanging -- ”

“ -- officers get bored too, here’s my question instead, why does my dress uniform not fit when I haven’t been eating half the stuff I’d be eating back home -- ”

“ -- well, I’m just saying, could be a chance of promotion or connections, or...”

“Not for you, nugfucker. If you bent your beauteous oculars over the docking schedule like someone with more than two brain cells you’d see it’s all church ships.”

“ -- yes, but -- ”

“You coming to the briefing tonight, Teach?” says one of the P.A.C., as Gamzee is off getting food. As far as Gamzee is concerned, talking is wasting valuable time when he could be chewing, slurping or inhaling. 

It takes you a moment to parse. “Curious! I didn’t see a briefing on the agenda.”

“This is cohort-run,” says another. “Legislacerator networking -- oh, shut _up,_ it’s not casteist, you guys hold church socials all the time and we can’t even be casteist, you’re indigo -- ”

Curiouser and curiouser. “No subjugglators?”

“You can get one night off, right?” There is general laughter, but it is not aimed at you. It is sourced mainly from the other legislacerators and it is quite companionable sound. You are surprised somehow, being reminded that there are others in the same boat. Sometimes it has seemed you are the only one shackled to the Mirthful Church. This is patently not true. “Come on, Teach, you never go to these things.”

This is because up until a day or so ago you were not popular, but you don’t remind them of uncomfortable truths. There is time enough later for uncomfortable truths. You look at Gamzee’s back over at the serving trays and you think _night off_ and it is appealling! Someone else says confidingly, “Don’t tell the officers, but we think someone’s bringing alcohol,” and you waver even more.

A party with alcohol! Rank hedonism! You should be staying inside your quarters completing a fake prosecution briefing, then eschewing sleep in favour of finishing your real one. Or, more likely, you should be having a complete breakdown at what is happening in the brig and the circles beyond your control. You have activities all along the spectrums of _practical_ and _understandable._

It would be irresponsible to party, no matter the likelihood of the club not being able to handle you. It would be an immature decision; it would be the kind of thing _Vriska_ would do, blow off the end of the world in order to furtively drink liquor out of plastic cups. A lot of awkward juvenile legislacerators blowing hot air out their seedflaps, all to the soundtrack of someone’s collected Lady Aghast mixes.

Three more nights until your court debut. Going would be really reprehensible. 

“I would never miss the chance to network!” you say.

GC: 1 N33D YOU TO B3 TH3 ON3 WHO KNOWS TH1S:  
GC: 1 4M  
GC: TOT4LLY  
GC: TR444444SH3D  
TA: tz what the fuck.  
GC: HOLy SH1T  
GC: YOU 4R3 4CTU4LLY TH3R3,, 1 THOUGHT TH1AS WOULD B3 4nOTH3R N1GHT WH3R3 1 JUsuT S4Y 3Mb34RR3SS1NG SH1T 4ND YOU $RR3NT TH3FR  
GC: TH3R3 4R3 TYPOS 1N TH3R3 WHOOPS >XD >XD  
GC: 1 W1LL TYP3 SO C4R3FULLY  
GC: LOOK 4T TH4T, P3RF3CT1ON, NOBODY WOULD 3V3R KNOW 1 4M 3MB4RR4SS1NGLY TO4ST3D ON L1K3 TWO DR1NKS  
TA: 2o you 2omehow found the tiime and iincliination iin thii2 entiire me22 two get drunk?  
TA: 2eriiou2ly?  
TA: ii can’t actually blame you.  
GC: L1K3 H3LL YOU C4NT!  
GC: WH3R3 TH3 MOTH3RFUCK H4V3 YOU B33n >:? >:????  
GC: S3R1OUSLY 1 4M B31NG S3R1OUS H3R3 1 4M 4 S3R1OUS DRUNK  
TA: fiighting fiire2.  
TA: keeping kk aliive.  
TA: he ha2 made 2o many dumb plan2 to 2priing tv, fuck, ii do not have hour2 iin the niight two de2criibe how dumb they are.  
GC: T3XTBOOK K4RK4T  
GC: BUT 1TS OK 1 H4V3 1T 444444LL UND3R cONTROL  
TA: yeah ii bet, whiich ii2 why you 2ent me a bunch of weiird fuckiing me22age2 from gz’2 hu2ktop. btw, tell hiim two 2top leaviing me creepy chat2.  
GC: WHO DO YOU TH1NK 1 4M  
GC: H1S MO1R41L  
GC: H4 H4 H4 H4 H4 H4 H4 H4 H4 H4 H4H4H4H4H4  
TA: ok, yeah, thii2 ii2 ab2olutely the be2t tiime two talk two you, what a reliief two fiinally get hold of you, ii’m not worried AT ALL.  
TA: fir2t whatever plan you are puttiing into actiion, 2top.  
TA: ii2 iit legal?  
GC: OF COURS3, WHO DO YOU TH1NK 1 4M  
TA: that barely make2 me feel better.  
GC: 1 4M GO1NG TO G1V3 TH3 COURT TH3 B3TT3R T4RG3T  
GC: TH3 CORR3CT T4RG3T  
GC: TH3 T4RG3T 1 GU3SS 1 SHOULD H4V3 BROUGHT 1N 4 LONG T1M3 4GO BUT 1 L4CK3D TH3 SH4M3 GLOB3S TO  
GC: 1 DONT KNOW WHY 1 4M NOT SUR3 WHY T1M3 4ND T1M3 4G41N 1 K33P TH1NK1NG SH3 CH4NG3S  
GC: 1 SHOULD H4V3 TOLD H3R YOU W3R3 ONTO H3R BUT 1 DONT TH1NK 1T WOULD H4V3 CH4NG3D 4 D4MN TH1NG NOTh1NG Ch4GN3S 4 GTDMN TH1NG WH4N 1T COM3S TO H3R  
GC: LOTS OF TYPOS TH3R3 TOO  
TA: you’re not goiing after vk. iit wiill change nothiing and, frankly, iif 2he were two be brought in ii would get her out.  
TA: 2he’2 miine now. ii am takiing her down for thii2.  
GC: FOR 4R4D14  
TA: for aa.  
TA: for how many time2 2he’2 nearly got the whii2tle blown on kk.  
TA: fuck, you, ii am gettiing her away from you.  
GC: LOL HOT  
TA: yeah well, tv ii2 a2 good a2 dead and ii don’t liike two 2ay iit, but there ii2 no gettiing hiim out of thii2.  
GC: OK YOU L1ST3N TO M3 TH4T 1S UTT3R HORS3SH1T 3V3N 1F H3 TOOK THO23 F1L3S W1LL1NGLY 1 DO NOT B3L13V3 H3 1S 4 CONSP1R4TOR 4ND 3V3N 1F H3 W4S 1T 1S 4LL VR1SK4S F4ULT  
GC: 1F 1 G1V3 TH3 COURT 3V1D3NC3 W3 C4N D3L4Y TR14L 3NOUGH TO H4V3 TH3M GO 4FT3R H3R 1NST34D 4ND 4 BLU3BLOOD TR14L C4S3 W1LL G3T F4R MOR3 4TT3NT1ON  
GC: H3LL B3 N33D3D 4S 4 W1TN3SS 1 C4N K33P H1M 4L1V3 1ND3F1N1T3LY 4ND TH3N SH3 W1LL B3 H4NG3D 4ND 1 C4N JUST M4YB3 SL33P 4T D4Y 4ND SH3 W1LL B3 GON3 4ND 1 C4N STOP  
TA: 2top what.  
GC: 1 DONT KNOW 1 C4N JUST STOP  
GC: GOD T3LL K4RK4T TO STOP ST1CK1NG H1S FROND 1N 1F H3 1S 1N D4NG3R (1 GU3SS 1D KNOW WHY BUT YOU ST1LL WONT T3LL M3 MY GOODN3SS 1F ONLY YOU H4D 4 L3G1SL4C3R4TOR ON S1D3!!!!!!!!!!!!) L3T M3 H4NDL3 TH1S  
TA: you don’t even know the place2 ii’ve told that douchebag to 2tiick hii2 frond, no fuckiing 2en2e of per2onal pre2ervatiion, hii2 2en2e of per2onal pre2ervatiion ii2 ME. II AM KARKAT’2 2EN2E OF PER2ONAL PRE2ERVATIION.  
TA: but tz, you’re naiive.  
GC: >:?  
TA: you are never goiing two get tavro2 out of there aliive.  
TA: and he’2 in thii2 deeper than you thiink, he’2 not ju2t any random 2on of a grub.  
TA: 2ometiime2 ii thiink he ha2 two diie ju2t two teach vk a fuckiing le22on about lo2iing, but then ii’d be a bulge and what would 2he learn, 2he never fuckiing learn2.  
GC: HOW D33P C4N T4VROS B3 WH3N VR1SK4 L34DS H1M 4ROUND BY TH3 SNOUT  
TA: thii2 ii2 your problem, you thiink everyone ii2 more gulliible than they are.  
TA: how’2 gz, on that note.  
GC: YOU KNOW 1 DONT W4NT TO T4LK 4BOUT 31TH3R H1M OR YOU 4ND YOUR SP3C14L W4Y OF KNOW1NG M3Y PROBL3mS OR WH4T3V3R  
TA: 2hee2h, fuck, ii ju2t want two know iif he’2 2tiill tryiing two get hold of kk.  
TA: ii’ve kiind of been blockiing 2ome of hii2 me22age2, kk can’t deal right now even iif he thiink2 he can.  
GC: OH MY GOD WH4T  
GC: YOU DOUCH3B4G YOUV3 B33N DO1NG WH4T 44444444UGH  
GC: 444444444UGH OH MY GOD YOU DONT 3V3N KNOW TH3 R3P3RCUSS1ONS H3R3 WOW 1 4M 1N 4 GL4SS C4S3 OF 3MOT1ON  
GC: FUCK FUCK FUCK!! DO3S K4RK4T ST1LL 4SK 4FT3R H1M  
TA: ye2.  
TA: all the tiime and ii can’t fuckiing 2TAND IIT.  
GC: W3LL H3 C4NNOT SHUT UP 4BOUT K4RK4T, YOU 4R3 NOT TH3 ONLY ON3 UND3RGO1NG TH1S D1SGUST1NGLY P4L3 B4RR4G3  
GC: DO3S TH4T M34N OUR K4RK4T R3C1PROC4T3S  
TA: won’t 2ay iit iin tho2e word2.  
TA: but iit ii2 obviiou2.  
GC: H4H4H4H4H4h4h4hh4H4H4h4h4h$H$h4h  
GC: W4NT TO KNOW SOM3TH1NG FUNNY  
GC: 1 W1SH H3 D1DNT 1 W1SH H3 D1DNT G1V3 4 SH1T 4BOUT G4MZ33 BUT 4T TH3 S4M3 T1M3 1 4M SO GL4D 1 4M GL4D H3 DO3S  
TA: only two driink2?  
GC: TH3Y W3R3 NOT SM4LL DR1NKS!!  
GC: WHY 4R3 YOU SO C3RT41N TH4T TH3Y W1LL N3V3R L3T T4VROS OFF  
GC: 1 KNOW H3 TH1NKS VR1SK4 1S COM1NG FOR H1M  
GC: VR1SK4 1S N3V3R GO1NG TO COM3 FOR 4NYON3  
GC: 1 ST1LL TH1NK 1 C4N S4V3 H1S L1F3 SOLLUX NOBODY 3LS3 1S GO1NG TO  
GC: 1F G4MZ33 BR34KS H1M OUT 1 DONT TH1NK H3 UND3RST4NDS TH4T TH3Y W1LL NOT L1V3 THROUGH TH3 PROC3SS  
TA: yeah well, gamzee’2 approach to realiity ha2 been proportiionate to hii2 panfriied IIQ.  
GC: 4CTU4LLY YOU WOULD B3 WRONG TH3R3 B3C4US3 1 W4S D3V4ST4T1NGLY WRONG TH3R3! 1 H4T3 MYS3LF FOR S4Y1NG TH1S BUT G4MZ33 1S NOT STUP1D  
GC: QU1T3 TH3 OPPOS1T3  
GC: 4ND H3 1S 4 LOW-DOWN D1RTY Z34LOUS L1TTL3 BULG3FUCK3R WHO T4ST3S OF D3C31T, GOD 4ND SH1TTY F4YGO!! H3 1S 4S 4RROG4NT 4S H3 1S P3TTY 4ND V1OL3NT 4ND S3LF-S4T1SF13D 4ND SUCKY 4ND 4PP4LL1NG TO WORK W1TH  
TA: 2o.  
TA: iif you’ve 2topped the gu2hiing.  
TA: 2hould ii break out a 2pade2 parade?  
GC: NO  
GC: WOW NO NO TH4T 1S NOT HOW 1T 1S 3V3N R3MOT3LY  
GC: NOT 4T 4LL! >:o  
GC: L1K3 ON3 B1T!! >:O  
TA: uh huh.  
GC: NO 1 M34N 1T >>>:[  
TA: why diid you 2uddenly grow three 2et2 of horn2.  
GC: 1T 1S TWO P41RS OF 4NGRY 3Y3BROWS 4ND MY SUP3R D1SPL34S3D R4CK  
GC: SOLLUX YOU DUMB SH1T 1 4M P4L3 FOR G4MZ33 4ND 1T 1S SO H4RD 4ND SO GROSS!  
GC: 4ND H3 1S 1N LOV3 W1TH K4RK4T 4ND K4RK4T WONT SP34K TO M3 OR H1M  
GC: 4ND 1 JUST W5NY TO P4P H1S DUMB CLOWn F4C3 4ND LOoK 4Ft3E H1m H3 1S SO b4D 4 T LOOk1NG 4FR HMSLERF BUT  
GC: OH NO TH3 S4DN3SS H4S SPR34D TO MY F1NG3RS 1 4M GO1NG TO H4V3 4NOTH3R DR1NK  
TA: whoa.  
TA: WHOA.  
TA: ii. what. why are you telliing me thii2, how diid you.  
TA: al2o how can you have another driink, diid you take the fuckiing booze WIITH you, thii2 iindiicate2 a problem.  
GC: NO  
GC: 1 4M ST1LL 4T TH3 P4RTY DUH 1 JUST D3C1D3D TO T4LK TO YOU B3C4US3 BOR3D  
GC: MY L1F3 1S R34LLY H4RD 4ND 1 4M S4D 4ND DRUNK 4ND WORR13D  
GC: 4DN COV3R3D 1N B1TCH3S 4T 4 P4RTY

  


  


TA: 2o.  
TA: gz, huh.  
GC: DONT W4NT TO T4LK 4BOUT 1T 3SP3C14LLY NOT TO YOU!!  
TA: what’2 that meant two mean.  
GC: SOLLUX 4FT3R TH1S COURT C4S3 TH3R3 1S 4 GOOD CH4NC3 OF 3V3RYTH1NG GO1NG STR41GHT TO H3LL L1K3 H1S HONOR4BL3 TYR4NNY W1LL B3 PR3S3NT 1 H4V3 NOT D1SCOUNT3D TH4 CH4NC3 H3 W1LL 34T G4MZ33 4ND 1 4S 1S H1S TYR4NN1C4L R1GHT  
GC: 4ND 1T 1S FUNNY BUT 1 4M K1ND OF R3S1GN3D TO TH3 F4CT TH4T 1 M1GHT D13 OR F41L W1THOUT H4V1NG S41D GOODBY3 TO K4RK4T  
TA: tz, 2top talkiing liike thii2. you 2aiid you were goiing to wiin, 2o iif you’re goiing ahead wiith thii2 dumb plan concentrate on that.  
GC: 1 4M B31NG R34L1ST1C!  
GC: 4LL 1 W4NT TO KNOW 1S TH4T H3 1S GO1NG TO B3 OK 1 KNOW ONLY SOM3TH1NG G1NORMOUS 4ND T3RR1BL3 WOULD K33P H1M 4W4Y TH1S LONG FROM G4MZ33  
TA: from you two.  
GC: >:?  
TA: from you.  
TA: only 2omethiing biigger than we ever could have gue22ed would have kept hiim from you. and gz, yeah. but you.  
GC: H4 H4 H4 WOW 1 4M SUCH 4 M4UDL1N DRUNK  
GC: 1S H3 GO1NG TO B3 OK  
TA: there are more people than ju2t my2elf on thii2 one but nobody ii2 gettiing two karkat except through me.  
TA: ii’m ju2t a very 2peciifiic lynchpiin here, ii got 2elected for thii2 a long tiime ago.  
GC: TH4T DO3SNT M4K3 4NY S3NS3  
GC: WHY WOULD YOU G3T S3L3CT3D BY YOURS3LF WH3N 1 H4V3 B33N H4NG1NG 4ROUND TOO FOR SW33PS 4ND SW33PS, 1 M34N S3R1OUSLY DO 1 NOT 3V3N G3T TH3 WOOD3N CONC4V3 S3RV1NG D3V1C3 4W4RD  
TA: yeah well, a2 iit turn2 out ii fiit a really 2peciifiic fucked up de2criiptiion and you don’t and ii’m fuckiing glad about that, frankly.  
TA: ii wa2 the piilot  
TA: and that’2 all there ii2 two 2ay on the matter.  
GC: WOW 3V3RYTH1NG NOW M4K3S P3RF3CT S3NS3 1 COULD F1LL 4 WHOL3 BUCK3T W1TH TH1S W3LL1NG 3NL1GHT3NM3NT M1ST3R C4PTOR  
TA: tz all iit mean2 ii2 that they get two kk over my dead body.  
TA: ii mean preferably theiir2 but iif iit come2 two that, my dead body.  
GC: BUT 1 DONT W4NT YOU TO D13  
TA: try two help tv.  
GC: TH1S 1SNT R1GHT >:[  
TA: one thiing ii learned from thii2 ii2 that there ii2n’t much riight wiith anythiing, tz, but there ii2 a whole lot wor2e than dyiing.  
TA: the noo2e ii2 ea2y, ii would take the noo2e every fuckiing tiime, do you KNOW where they’d put a p2iioniic like me if ii got caught. that happen2 two me, ii want you two promii2e you’d 2liit my neckpiipe.  
GC: C4UGHT DO1NG WH4T  
TA: ha ha, niice try.  
TA: do you really thiink there’2 a chance you won’t ever 2ee me and kk agaiin.  
GC: YOU DO NOT QU1T3 KNOW WH4T G4MZ33 1S C4P4BL3 OF B3C4US3 1 4M NOT 3V3N SUR3 WH4T G4MZ33 1S C4P4BL3 OF TH3R3 1S NO CH4NC3 OF H1M 3V3R GO1NG B4CK ON SOPOR  
GC: 4ND 1F H3 THOUGHT 1T WOULD B3N3F1T T4VROS 1 TH1NK H3 WOULD ST4RT MOW1NG THROUGH 3V3RYBODY ON TH1S SH1P UNT1L H3 W4S T4K3N DOWN  
GC: TH3Y W4NT3D M3 TO K1LL H1M 4ND 1 TH1NK 1 UND3RST4ND WHY  
GC: H3 1S NOT CONTROLL4BL3!  
GC: W3LL  
GC: NOT BY M3 >:I  
TA: ii’m 2orry.  
GC: 1 4M SORRY TOO  
TA: 2orry you have bad ta2te.  
GC: J4M 1T THOROUGHLY DOWN YOUR CHUT3, J4CK4SS!!!!  
GC: 1 4M GO1NG TO S3ND YOU TH3 3V1D3NC3 F1L3S TON1GHT 4ND YOU W1LL PR1S3 VR1SK4S S1GN4TUR3 OFF TH3M  
GC: 1T W1LL B3 TH3R3, 4ND W1TH 4 CONF3SS1ON 4ND MY C4S3 PR3S3NT4T1ON 1 C4N THROW 3NOUGH DOUBT TO G3T H3R 4RR3ST3D  
TA: are you 2ure you can do iit.  
GC: Y3S TH1S 1S F4R MOR3 TH4N C1RCUMST4NT14L 3V1D3NC3 1 H4V3 H3R3  
TA: no ii mean, can you take down vk iif you get that far and ii’m not 2ure you wiill.  
TA: the thiing between you and her ii2 the one thiing ii don’t even begiin to under2tand about you.  
GC: YOU S41D SH3 W4S YOURS  
GC: SH3 1S NOT  
GC: SH3 1S M1N3!  
TA: yeah that’2 what ii mean.  
GC: SOLLUX 1 4M M1S3R4BL3 4ND B4L4NC3D 4TOP 4 PR3C4R1OUS P1L3 OF B1TCH3S JUST T4K3 MY WORD FOR GR4NT3D  
TA: any good-lookiing biitche2, there.  
GC: OH Y34H MY B1TCH3S 4R3 SO 4D3QU4T3 YOU DONT 3V3N KNOW  
GC: WH3N TH3Y M4K3 M3 4 G3N3R4L 4DVOC4T3 1 4M JUST GO1NG TO SL33P 1N 4 P1L3 OF V3RY SOFT B1TCH3S 1 H4V3 G4TH3R3D SP3C1F1C4LLY FOR TH3 PURPOS3  
TA: go back two your quarter2 tz.  
TA: you are goiing two be 2o fuckiing hungover iin the eveniing.  
GC: H4 H4 H4 Y34H  
GC: PL34S3 T4K3 C4R3 OF K4RK4T FOR M3  
GC: 1F YOU W4NT TO G1V3 H1M 4 B1G SLOPPY K1SS FOR M3 S3ND TH3 P1CTUR3S  
TA: ii’ll talk two you before the triial. the fiile 2ource2 wiill be in your iinbox, vk leave2 a traiil liike a cholerbear on diiaretiic2.  
TA: and 2hould ii kii22 kk ii’ll 2end you a piicture of me clean2iing my food trap wiith fiire afterward2 becau2e that’2 what ii’ll requiire.  
TA: take care of gz.  
GC: 1 TRY TO >:\  
TA: no ii mean, take CARE of gz, he goe2 on a rampage iin your diirectiion then don’t he2iitate, don’t 2tay your hand for kk or anyone.  
GC: SOLLUX  
GC: 1 4M ST1LL DRUNK TH3R3FOR3 1 C4N T3LL YOU TH4T 1 M1SS YOU  
TA: you’ll mii22 your fiiltratiion 2ponge2 more.  
TA: fuck. one la2t reque2t. wiith tv, there’2 one thiing you need to do and then maybe you’ll fiinally under2tand what you’re up agaiin2t.  
GC: >:?  
TA: frii2k hiim.  
GC: WH4T >>>:?  
TA: he won’t want two let you, but frii2k hiim.  
GC: W3LL OK BUT TH4T SOUNDS L1K3 TH3 1NTRO TO 3V3RY PORNO 3V3R

\-- gallowsCalibrator [GC] ceased trolling twinArmageddons [TA] \--

  


* * *

  
The next evening Sollux is right about two important things: you are incredibly hungover, and Mr. Nitram does not want frisking. He is decidedly unfrisky. You have stumbled out of your recuperacoon early enough to avoid your subjugglator partner -- you made the decision that Gamzee would want to either frisk too _much_ or frisk too _little_ \-- but even without him you stand there with your gloves on, a hungover gleam, and a cavalreaper in an obvious state of Do Not Want.

Tavros has kicked back his chair. His cuffed wrists are held out beseechingly. His ankles are cuffed too; you are less certain of their captivity. A long time ago Vriska wheeled him over to the hive of Equius Zahhak and demanded he augment unresponsive flesh with metal and pins, wire the nerves so that Tavros had some ability to walk, and the result is deadly. The way he lumbers on his robobraces is not graceful or quick, but he could kick a door down if he wanted to.

“I’ll scream,” he says, further making this like the intro to every porno ever.

“I am very sorry, but this ship is full of subjugglators and none of them care if you scream.”

“I’m not carrying any contraband, or hidden objects, or things you’d be interested in, and so -- they haven’t let me use the ablution block for showering in quite some time, it’s -- ”

“I am going to frisk you,” you say, “not get down with your body, Private, although I would like to say you have grown very nearly good-looking!” (“Uh,” he says.) “I thought you and I could have a private talk. We will take it very slow, because I have discovered if I move too fast I upchuck.”

“I’d like Gamzee to be present, please, for this attempt at touching my person with your hands, on my body,” he says firmly.

“I will inform him of the fact later. Mr. Makara will swoon dead away. Perhaps we could negotiate the frisking?”

Tavros does not look as though he wants to negotiate frisking, considering he’s backed himself into a corner and is holding out his hands in the universal sign for stop, but he nods slowly. His face is somewhat haunted, though for a man on Death Row this is not a surprise. You’ve made inquiries; he is getting fed, and he is not getting unduly molested, so you are happy on that count. You sit down in the chair he vacated and try not to taste the fuzz on your tongue. 

“I am making inquiries as to the files you have been sent,” you say. You work your hand out of one glove as though you are relenting re: friskiness; there is never any sense in showing all your cards. “I’ll have results back in a few hours. Tavros, I will know who sent them to you.”

“They’re protected, digitally,” he says, and hastily adds; “Which stands to reason, on account of how I don’t know who sent them either, which is to say, they’re anonymous.”

“I am _excessively_ hungover,” you say. “Please stop lying to me.”

“I’m not -- ”

“And do not raise your voice so loudly. Vomit can reach amazing trajectories.”

He looks at you. There is a certain set to his mouth. You rest back against the blessedly cool edge of the interrogation table and he folds his arms as best he can. The stubble next to the long mohawk of dark hair on his head is getting a little long, you notice muzzily. “I’m sorry,” he says, “that you chose to, put alcohol in your body irresponsibly, to the point where you have a hangover, which isn’t anyone’s fault but yours. Were you with Gamzee?”

“Gamzee does not drink,” you say, “and I was having a night off from Gamzee.”

More cannily than you’d anticipated, he says: “I didn’t mean to cause any discord between the two of you, because it seems you’ve been getting along fine, except that you’ve been letting him overdose on the sopor.”

“What you saw was not a sopor overdose.” You cross one knee over the other, and you let your shoulders slump back. “What you saw was the result of a sopor _under-dose_ after quite a long period of sobriety. He was very adamant that when he saw you, he wanted to be under the influence.”

The bafflement you’re smelling, sharp and a little curdly, is real. “I guess I don’t understand why he would do a thing like that?”

“Taking sopor again, or going cold gobblebeast in the first place?”

“Either,” he says, “both.”

“It is a long and complicated story and one I would happily tell you were I not about to throw up out of my noseholes,” you say, “although -- you never saw him off sopor the entire time in your friendship, Mr. Cinnamon? Was he ever prone to erratic tempers or weird behaviours, and did he ever brutally murder people, things like that?”

The bafflement smell increases. “When I was five sweeps I nursed a hurt beakbeast, and it died,” he says, “and he helped me leave it in a meadow and he sang a song of sadness for it, which was really affecting, and what I’m getting at is that I never saw him hurt anything on purpose, which is pretty unusual, considering.”

“Considering?”

“Highbloods.”

Interesting.

“If he’s not happy off the sopor then I think he should go back on the sopor,” says Tavros. “I care about Gamzee -- a lot -- and I think he’s special, and unusual, and I’ve been worrying a lot about him lately, which is to say, you should go easy on him. Personally speaking. A lot of what he says might be creepy, inadvertantly or, more advertantly, but -- he means really well. He’s different. He believes in a lot of things most trolls don’t believe in.”

In you is a very strange, visceral grief.

“I wish you loved him,” you say.

“I do, I just -- I don’t love him in the way he wants me to love him,” says the cavalreaper, and there is a high chocolatey flush to his cheeks. “Because he kind of wants me to love him in a way that involves tongues, which might sound like an egotistical assumption on my part, but as assumptions go is one I’m really sure about. I think I’ve made it clear, though, and I think he’s mostly stopped, thinking about me that way.”

You do not disabuse him of this incredibly incorrect notion. “Were you aware,” you say, “that off sopor, he has a perfect memory to repeat anything he has read?” From the expression on Tavros’s face, he was not. “Were you aware that off sopor, he has the capability to rip a troll’s head from its shoulders? Did you know he has the ability to form complicated opinions on the nature of Imperial-condoned religious liberties and their place in court law? Do you know the intentions of the Gods he serves?”

Private Nitram is an open book; he always has been. He keeps to his corner and does not bother to school his face, half-lit and thrown into sharp planes of shadow by the interrogation lamp. Watching makes you remember him in wigglerhood, when he was too apt to show himself as needy, whiny, resentful, steeped in his own hard self-pity: the mix of syrupy passive-aggression that somehow was your sister’s perfect storm. It makes you remember chippy, fearless Aradia spiralling a long curl around a finger and Tavros staring with terminal drymouth as Vriska carried on about character sheets, both of them spellbound by nothing more than her energy and tangly hair --

“I know he loved his lusus even though his lusus was irresponsible,” he says.

“What has that got to do with _anything?”_

“It seems to me like you’re trying to describe him as this different person, transformed, you’re telling me I don’t know him,” says Tavros, and rolls his shoulderblades just once against the grooves in the wall. “I don’t think it’s possible to lose yourself forever, and I don’t think the Gamzee who was with me, and the hurt beakbeast, isn’t the same Gamzee who’s all the things you just described.”

You look at him with your smile wide and white until he squirms a little. Even front-line shock trainees do not like your smile. “You _do_ pity him a little, I think.”

His agony is immediate perfume. “The topic I’m trying to, stick on, and not be derailed from, is that I just think that being capable of great evil isn’t always a signifier, of not being capable of great good, which is -- something that I’ve told myself a lot during basic training, to keep up my confidence. I think my emotional serenity is mostly high -- ”

“Is this why you think Vriska Serket is coming to save you?”

Your accused’s emotional serenity is immediately at a low. This is the panic you were waiting to sniff. “I have always thought you were equal parts saint, victim, or utterly dumb when it came to her,” you say, “and this is the only thing I’m not sure about, your reasoning. She is _not coming,_ Mr. Cinnamon. She never intended for you to be caught with those files; she tried to thoroughly to hide them, there is a lot of effort -- ”

“ _Symbolhight:_ Nitram,” he rasps, with a dry tongue. “ _Hatching name:_ Ta -- ”

_“She is not going to come for you!”_

Your voice is loud and ugly, and it once again leads to a lack of surety about your stomach contents. Surprise at yourself brings on nausea. You had planned to trick him into this, not browbeat. Likelihood of throw-up is at a murky percentage, and your understanding of the scents and shapes around you swims briefly until you find your tongue again: “You know as well as I do that she does not care who falls by the wayside. She will count this as your fault. She will blame you for your own execution until her dying breath and not spare you another thought! Did she tell you that her plan was foolproof? Did she say you’d never take the heat for her? Vriska _lies.”_

He opens his mouth like an upset fish, then closes it again. “She took a lot of risks, getting those files,” he says, and there’s your confession, that’s all you needed.

“She runs away,” you say. “She will be in her quarters, sitting on her hands, hating everything, not knowing how to do anything but resent you for getting caught. She will not act. When she has a bad roll, she ignores the roll! She is too lonely and uptight and stupid to deal with a failure directly, which is why never said she was sorry to you with anything better than leg surgery. Vriska lies, and she gambles with people, and she never admits defeat or fault. Loving her never _helps,_ Mr. Nitram, nobody can ever love her enough.”

For a moment you assume he is remembering what you’re remembering: the night that Sollux laid Aradia’s solemn little body in her hive, and walked away from its ruins to never return. Team Charge’s ignominous end.

Instead he says, “You did pity her, a little.” 

You lose all composure for about two seconds, your face and hands feeling odd and hot. “It would be hypocritical of me if I asked you to never say that again, I expect.”

“Hypocritical would be, the most correct term to use, at least in this instance.”

“I do not expect Vriska to come for you,” you say, “because I am not so demented as to think Vriska would ever come for me.”

It is an embarrassing admission. _Anyone dum8 enough to end up in a court8lock is too dum8 to save!_ He finally knows. The fear is a thin, smoke-smelling curl around deep tarry wells of stubbornness. The smell deepens as you heave yourself out of the chair, sniffer working overtime. “I’m not expecting anyone to rescue me, or ride in to help,” says Tavros. “And I’m not -- I haven’t been, and I won’t be -- afraid to die.”

 _That_ is a lie if ever you tasted one. 

“If you take to the stand as my witness, Gamzee and I can give you protection. You will live.”

You are not gleefully feeding off his pain and terror. It makes you miserable, in fact. Instead of his rising crestfallen rating you would have preferred him to remain sanguine, stoic, knowing something you didn’t about the possibility of a miracle. You proffer the chair, and like a dumb beast of burden he comes and sits down in it, because even in his stubbornest throes Tavros Nitram would hate to look rude. He lumbers forward automatically to with a mumble of thanks, and you take the opportunity to slide the other glove on and frisk him like a night at the club.

He seizes immediately, but despair makes his limbs slow. You nudge the chair forward to pin his bare arms to the table and feel down them, looking for whatever weapon you imagine he’s slipped himself thinking it will aid in some rescue. There is nothing beneath the skin there, nor in his pockets or on his thighs, and you pat upwards on his abdominals and to his spinecage and feel something lumpy underneath his silly vest. You know you’ve hit paydirt when you sniff his spike of fear.

“Dear, dear,” you say, “they did not bother to inspect you at all, although I am very sorry for any coming overtones of sexual harrassment -- ”

_“Terezi, don’t, please, just.”_

Under his vest there are bandages, wound about his chest and under his arms. You are puzzled. There are matching uneven lumps at the back on either side of the spinal cord, cupping over each shoulderblade, padded down with pressure tape -- you peel back the tape, and the bandages loosen and allow you enough give to tug them down.

Your hands fly back as though you expect them to go up in smoke. Clear carbonated citrus fills your noseholes. The wingbuds on his back bleed clear fluid, erupting from an emergent cluster of muscles, but this does not seem to be due to your tampering. The skin all around is blistered and flushed sepia from the irritation, but again you would suspect this being due to a tight cocoon of bandages rather than your prodding. When Tavros squirms the sunset-coloured filaments flutter.

“The wing gene is extinct,” you breathe. Your hands, heroically, do not shake. “You are a throwback.”

“That is not a word I like to use, in a personal frame of reference way,” he says primly.

“But this makes you a direct descendant of -- ”

“The Summoner,” he says, surprising you again. There is a note of strange, proud shyness to him as he corrects you: “And ‘the’. For me. Because I’m the only one, you see, I am the Summoner’s only descendant, grammatically. And genetically.”

If you had ever had to line up all the trolls you knew and pick out which one was _least_ likely to be the Summoner’s descendant, you would have only picked Tavros Nitram second if, say, a bucket of rocks was present. You would have confidently awarded the prizes and signed the credit cheques. You are absolutely stunned, and then you remember what this means. “Vriska knows.”

He confirms this with a miserable nod. Now you understand. She is never coming for him, and there is little chance he will live. Even unknowing allegiance with a descendant of history’s most controversial revolutionary would ruin her career, at best outset, lead her to the chopping block at the worst. It is very bitterly you think that his capture wouldn’t have been part of her plan, but that she might feel a little relief to have such a precarious pawn taken out of play. You wish your lacrimals would stop smarting at the thought; it has been a very long time since you were this angry at Vriska.

“If you are back there,” says Tavros, “I would really appreciate it if you could just rub them a little, and this is something I wouldn’t be asking if I wasn’t in, um, disconcerting amounts of discomfort.”

You massage your knuckles around the oozy erupting winglets, which is disgusting on a number of levels but seems to give him relief. There is no statute defining wing-carriers as mutants, but this is only because the DNA sequence for wing-carriers was destroyed methodically. There was no legal need. “How long can we keep them hidden?”

“This is three seasons of growth,” he tells you, “and, gauging it, I think that in another season the growth will have doubled, so that binding them down isn’t going to be a practical option.”

“I am going to do everything I can to keep you alive,” you say, and you massage his gross winglets further, getting all the fluid out. Truthfully, you would think the wings as nothing but exciting had they not also represented instant death for everyone whose oculars had beheld them. You have always been fond of wings.

Tavros lets out a shaky sigh. His despair is not replaced by hope, but by icy, snow-smelling numbness. You continue steadily, “If you cooperate with my investigation, I will pull every string I have access to. Do not underestimate my slyness quotient, Private, I have never considered the culling laws a foundation of our legal system -- ”

He says, “Do you know what was, for me, the saddest thing about the hurt beakbeast I nursed?”

You do not, and say as much. “I bandaged it up correctly,” says Tavros. “There was no pain, or sign that it would die, or anything like that. By my estimation it was going to be fine. There was nothing wrong with it, physically, that is to say...”

He cranes his head around to look at you. There is something wild in his dark, dirty eyes, and wilder still in his fearful, watery smile. “Things with wings don’t live, in captivity.”

Both of you are silent as you replace the dirty bandages, sticky and stiff with his lymph. You wind them back around, not wanting to be too tight but at the same time not wanting anyone to inadvertantly see -- you will recommend that the accused not receive pre-trial ablution privileges -- and he fusses the whole time, which makes you feel better. Somehow Tavros saying, “Um,” and “Ow,” and “Is it meant to feel, as though, my ribs have been compromised,” is hopeful.

“I have a statement for you to read on the stand,” you say, and you slide it from your sylladex to place on the table. “Please note the part which says you have been interrogated brutally; the League of Legislacerators is not so archaic to believe that truth can only be twisted from lowbloods through torture, but many of the Church will be in attendance. _They_ very much do. I advise you to please indicate the trauma.”

Tavros skims over the flimsy, looking a little sickly at circled areas. “But I don’t have any -- ”

You pop him in the socket. He yelps. “I am very sorry,” you say, as he clutches his face and peers at you balefully. “These things never happen easily if you get warned about them. There are all kinds of false starts. I promise you that you will have an air of seductive puffiness on the stand.” 

“I don’t think I would have consented to that,” he says.

“We shall never know!”

The cavalreaper rubs fretfully at the beginnings of what you hope will be a lovely bruised ocular, rereading his statement as you begin to tidy up. The expression on his face is very grave, and his unsurety reeks of burnt plastic. You had anticipated protestations. You think these protestations will disappear when he is presented before his Honourable Tyranny in two nights’ time. But you did not expect --

“When did you stop believing in her?”

It takes you a moment to answer. “She doesn’t need the power of my belief to live,” you say, more stiffly than you like. “Fairies are not real, Tavros.”

The look on his face is horribly patronizing. Before he can open his mouth and elaborate the door alarm blares, and the passcode pounded audibly from outside. You expect the prison guard. You do not expect Gamzee Makara, orange-eyed from fury and sopor come-down, mouth full of sleep and hair in disarray as he beholds the scene. 

“Private Nitram has confessed to everything,” you say, which was a poor choice combined with the accused’s eye injury and your lymph-stained gloves.

“You went behind my back,” he says hoarsely. “BEHIND MY BACK YOU UP AND YOU WENT LIKE IT WAS MOTHERFUCKING _PILGRIMAGE SEASON,_ SIS.”

“I am not dealing with your shit tonight!”

“I’ve of a mind to not deal with your shit EVER the MOTHERFUCK again,” he says, “of a mind to squeeze you ‘till your WICKED LITTLE WAYS come SQUIRTING OUT YOUR ARTERIES.”

Gamzee is very loud. You are reminded of your truly exquisite hangover. Your blade is unsheathed with a liquid _snick_ that also reminds you of your truly exquisite hangover, but your only desire is suddenly to have him on his back. You would whip purple stripes in him with your sword until he was calm again. Perhaps your desire for moirallegiance really is that kinky. “Shall we flip on it?” you say.

From behind you, Tavros says “Oh, my God.”

“I’m gonna MOTHER FUCKING FLIP _SOMETHING,”_ he says.

And so he does: the interrogation table gets tumbled over with a bang and a clatter, your accused pushing himself away as it is tossed to the side. When in this mood, you discover that Gamzee is very bad at multitasking; you anticipate a death blow, but his attention is now for the long-horned boy in the chair. He lopes towards him and not you, which gives you a very strange pang of annoyance as he reaches out and grasps Tavros’s jaw with trembling hands. Your accused manages, “Hi,” before the subjugglator smooches him right on the mouth.

  


  


All your irritation melts away into weariness. Tavros smells like a blood-flushed chocolate bar, and he dares to neither close his eyes nor move a muscle while Gamzee macks away. You grieve how your partner kisses him over and over and over as though beginning the kiss again will provoke a different reaction, as a sharp tooth scores a thin line of brown down Tavros’s chin. You hear Gamzee breathe, “Brother mine,” and it is embarrassing for everyone.

The cavalreaper turns his face away and touches Gamzee’s shoulders instead, cuffs jangling. His hands are spread wide and open and gentle, but his turned-away face speaks louder than the hands. The love that dares not speak its name will apparently not be spoken with tongues. “Yeah,” says your subjugglator, quiet, surprisingly unbitter. “Yeah. Just you wait, brother mine, you ain’t seen _shit_ yet, I can better myself for you like all motherfuck.”

“Gamzee, I -- ”

“We’ll up and fucking rap it out soon, you and me,” he says, and you have never seen him try to hit and miss _gentle_ so wide of the mark. Gamzee tries to cup his face again but squeezes a trifle too hard, because Tavros has to jerk away with a wince. “Just me and motherfuckin’ you.”

“I am sorry to cut this short,” you say, “but you and I have _two_ prosecution briefings to complete, Mr. Makara. I am about one hundred and two percent certain that our client should get some rest before his upcoming court case.” The look that your client gives you is sort of murkily grateful, but is also a bit miffed. Rude! The look that Gamzee gives you is just filthy, but this isn’t new. “I would also like a large jug of water and some painkiller termites, if anyone was interested in my desires.”

“THEN I GUESS WE HAD BETTER FUCK OFF,” says Gamzee, very loud and very close to your aural canals. “BETTER GET OUR MOTHER FUCKING GLUTES UP IN ALL THIS ACTION YOU GOT GOING ON, TERECITA.”

“You have made your point,” you say.

There is no need for you to turn your head to see the look that your partner gives Tavros as you leave, nor the resigned one that he gives in return. It stinks of guilt: a very sad, harried kind of guilt, a sweet decaying guilt like old fruit. There is only one pain more acute than the pain of not being desired, you think, and that is the pain of not desiring someone enough. 

When you are out in the corridor, your palmhusk beeps. When you see the message your innards turn to ice, and you shelter it from your sulking subjugglator.

  


* * *

  
\-- arachnidsGrip [AG] has unblocked gallowsCalibrator [GC]! --

AG: What had to 8e done.

\-- arachnidsGrip [AG] has blocked gallowsCalibrator [GC]! --

  


* * *

  
On the last night you go to tour the fifth-level briefing hall. The student courtroom on the Executor is far too small for the required purposes -- its gallery is paltry, for instance, and there is nowhere near enough room for his Honourable Tyranny -- and so they have been converting the briefing hall into a temporary courtblock. The Committee For Doing Shit With Blueprints And Carpenting Drones has been having a fine old time recreating the trappings of the high court, and the P.A.C. are excited to lead you to the prosecutorial dais. 

You get a bench and desk, of course -- this isn’t the bad old days, when prosecution would have to gamely and athletically declaim to his Tyranny the whole time -- and you also get front-row seats to the gallows. Gallows construction has been completed with no small amount of care. Each lever gleams in fresh readiness for the hanging. You stand at the waxed bench and smell furniture smells, imagine the rustle of a filled gallery behind you and a convict in front, and you ache to feel the excitement you always imagined you’d feel.

“It looks very different,” says a voice behind you, “from this angle.”

You and the P.A.C. fire off hasty salutes as you turn around. The Brigadier-General is gazing up at the big empty well where his Tyranny will be installed, a thoughtful expression upon her face. The bright lights make her skin granite colour. “In courtblock dramas they always manage to make the prosecutors look dwarfed by his Honourable Tyranny,” she says. “Once up there, though, you will find his size isn’t a factor -- one tends to think of his monstrousness only later. Trainee Pyrope, if you’d care to walk with me.”

You fall into step next to the Advocate, cane tapping on the ground as you circumnavigate the room. It seems as though every chair on the level has been moved into the makeshift courtblock; Parlet stops to check the dividing wall separating the gallery from the legislacerative stenographer’s seat, and her face is impassive as ever. You wonder if you only imagine the fine, patient lines of stress at her mouth.

“I have read the prosecution plan you and Subjugglator Makara handed in,” she says, and continues briskly to the back of the room. You have to scamper to keep up. “Very well-researched. Clearly outlined. You have read the statutes to the fullness of accepted lawful understanding. A classic example of a heresy trial argument, Legislacerator.”

“Thank yo -- ”

“Do not interrupt,” says Parlet, and strides on ahead. Her uniform is crisp and neat and cavalier, and she has never told you to not interrupt before. “As I was saying, a classic example. Traditional in the extreme, up to and including the cliche of a Neophytic starting point to build the case. I can also see the stamp of Subjugglator Makara.”

Considering that Subjugglator Makara lay on the floor alternately sulking and reciting case studies for you the whole day through -- his favourite research trick is to make up a fake citation and see whether or not you sniff the lie, which is a trick that makes you want to jump up and down on his face -- you become suspicious. The Advocate continues tersely, “It’s pat. I would accept it as a fine piece of work from any stolid, by-the-book legislacerative trainee, but not you. It’s a severe deviation from your style.”

You attempt to make your face a picture of disappointed innocence, but your face has never taken to disappointed innocence at all. “You said the case was cut and dry, sir.”

“Give me your second draft.”

 _Now_ liquid nitrogen runs through your glands. You do not like to lie directly; it is the hallmark of someone with their back to the wall, an inelegant way to play the game. One must dance around the truth, not head to the territory of a falsehood. But in the end you say: “There is no second draft.”

“This case has gained some attention from unexpected sources,” says the Advocate, and takes off her glasses to wipe them on her jacket. You realise: she is anxious. “Your audience may not simply be teachers and peers, Soliciteen. You and your partner will have to deal with political ramifications you haven’t been _partially_ taught to navigate. I wouldn’t put a seasoned legislacerator of ten sweeps in the situation you’re about to walk into.”

“Sir?”

“I have seen more than one legislacerator die at their first court case,” she says. “And I have seen more than one legislacerator fall afoul of the Church. I can make no intercession here, Pyrope.”

You are filled with a strange fondness, marbled as it is with upset. The Brigadier-General is someone you admire. The Brigadier-General is someone your cohort universally admires; quite unlike the Ecstatic Exarch, who is a lot more polarising, it is agreed amongst the students that the Advocate is just and benign. You are sorry too; whatever happens tomorrow night is probably going to reflect badly on her as your personal mentor, and even if you are dead, being dead is easy. There is a whole lot worse than dying. 

“I understand, sir,” you say.

“You may think you do, but you really don’t,” says General Parlet sharply, and places the glasses squarely back on her nosebridge. “I would _like_ to see you and Makara use that case briefing, without deviation, in the courtblock tomorrow. It will not give you a case that abhorristorians will remember forever, but there is something to be said for a lack of notoriety and a surfeit of pulse... Go and continue your preparations, Pyrope.”

Thoroughly disconcerted, you make your way to your quarters. For an organization based entirely around the pursuit of truth, justice and the Imperial way, you have discovered that the League of Legislacerators is full to bursting with secrets. It is plumped up with vagueries and mystery. Once upon a time you would have been excited to swell with the host of things unknown, but you are discovering now that deceit and confusion are not that exciting to deal with. The Church and the Bar don’t truck in clarification. Transparency would be nice.

You return to your quarters replete with a can of Faygo you scabbed off a subjugglator -- you’ve gained a taste for the flavour you can only describe as “green slop” -- and you sit at your desk, feeling empty and unhappy and taut. Your second draft sits in a folder tucked away in your modus, a brutal indictment on heresy laws and the Covertraumatics both, while your first is laid out like a benevolent smile next to your husktop. Both you and Gamzee spent a long time on that second one. Remarkably, you have kept the identity of your real offender obscure; you wonder if he doesn’t want to know, is saving himself another rampage through being ignorant of Vriska’s crimes.

Trollian beeps:

\-- twinArmageddons [TA] has begun trolling gallowsCalibrator [GC]! --

TA: good, you’re there. how hiigh are the 2take2.  
GC: H1GH3R TH4N 3V3R  
GC: 1 C4NNOT JUMP OV3R TH3S3 TOW3R1NG ST4K3S 1 T4K3 4 RUN-UP 4ND K1ND OF FLOP OV3R TH3 M1DDL3 DU3 TO TH31R OV3RWH3LM1NG H1GHN3SS  
TA: diid you frii2k tv.  
GC: Y3S!!!!  
GC: YOU KNOW 1F YOU H4D JUST S41D “BTW T4VROS 1S 4CTU4LLY 4 L3G1T R34L L1F3 F41RY” 1T WOULD H4V3 M4D3 TH1NGS 4 LOT QU1CK3R  
TA: there’2 2tiill 2tuff ii’m unwiilliing to talk about even in a clo2ed channel, call me 2uper2tiitiiou2. we 2houldn’t even talk about iit now.  
TA: thii2 wiill be the la2t tiime we do for a whiile.  
GC: W41T, WH4T >:?  
TA: makiing up for pa2t 2iin2, here, ii got you ten miinute2, no le22, no more.  
TA: and ii meant two say before, but wa2 prevented by low point2 put iintwo beiing good at thii2 2hiit, ii miinmaxed here.  
TA: tz.  
TA: ii mii22 you all the tiime.

\-- twinArmageddons [TA] has ceased trolling gallowsCalibrator [GC]! --

  


\-- CONNECTING TO SECURE SERVER --  


  


  


\-- CONNECTING -- CONNECTING --  


  


  


\-- FOUND CONNECTION --  


  


\-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling gallowsCalibrator [GC]! --

CG: WE HAVE EXACTLY TEN MINUTES FOR ME TO EXPOUND UPON ALL THE WAYS YOU ARE A RECKLESS, PUFFED-UP, SELF-AGGRANDIZING GRAIN OF EGO SHOVED INTO THE MOUTH OF AN ASS-CLAM, COVERED IN FINE LAYERS OF FECKLESSNESS BEFORE EMERGING AS A GLITTERING DIPSHIT PEARL.  
CG: PRETEND I GAVE YOU THE RIGOROUS VERBAL EXFOLIATION YOU DESERVED, THEN GOT TO THE CORE OF THE MATTER:  
CG: IF YOU AND THAT FUCKING CLOWN DON’T LIVE THROUGH THE TRIAL, TEREZI PYROPE, I WILL FIND A WAY TO BRING YOU BACK AND I WILL SCREAM UNTIL YOU ARE ONLY ABLE TO UNDERSTAND THE LANGUAGE OF MY ANGER.  
GC: 1 N3V3R THOUGHT 1 WOULD TYP3 TH1S BUT 1 H4V3 M1SS3D YOUR 4NGRY W1TT3R1NG SO D33PLY  
GC: SOM3T1M3S 1 Y3LL3D 4T CR34K1NG NO1S3S 4ND 1NCORR3CT T3MP3R4TUR3S 1N ORD3R TO R3CR34T3 H4V1NG YOU 4ROUND, BUT 1T N3V3R WORK3D!  
GC: 4R3 YOU C3RT41N YOU 4R3 UP TO T4LK, SOLLUX H4S TOLD M3 YOU H4V3 B33N UND3R 4 LOT OF STR3SS 4ND YOU PROB4BLY SHOULDNT F41NT 4T YOUR T1M3 OF L1F3 >:T  
CG: ONE, FUCK YOU. TWO, FUCK YOU. THREE, COLLATE EARLIER TIMES WHEN YOU HAVE FUCKED YOURSELF AND MAKE IT INTO A MARATHON EVENT OF VARIOUS WAYS TO SELF-FUCK.  
CG: I HAVE BEEN UNDER MORE STRESS IN THE PAST COUPLE SEASONS THAN A WHOLE ROOMFUL OF SURGITERRORS FACED WITH A FIELD OF SEVERED ARTERIES. THE TYPE OF TRIAGE THAT WOULD HAVE TO BE PERFORMED ON MY STRESS WELLS WOULD MAKE A WAR VETERAN WEEP.  
CG: I AM ACTUALLY HERE TO CHECK ON YOU, YOU FUCKING WOECHUMP.  
CG: MORALE PURPOSES. COMFORT. CAMARADERIE. I HAVE DISCOVERED THE BEST HEROIC ESCAPADES ARE THE ONES THAT MAKE YOU FEEL MARGINALLY LESS LIKE SHIT.  
GC: 1 W4NT TO KNOW WH4T 1S GO1NG ON  
CG: I CAN’T TELL YOU. I’M SORRY. I REALLY AM. I AM WORKING WITH THAT RARE CONCEPT, “PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY.”  
GC: 1 4M R34LLY S1CK 4BOUT TH4T CONC3PT B31NG B4ND13D 4ROUND 4T 4 T1M3 WH3N 1 4M 4LR34DY D33P 1N 1MPL4US1BL3 D3N14B1L1TY!  
GC: 1 H4V3 S33N M1ST3R C1NN4MONS SHOULD3RC4PS, K4RK4T, TH3Y COULD 4LR34DY T4K3 M3 OUT B4CK 4ND PUT 4 CLUB TO MY TH1NKP4N  
GC: BUT 1F 1T H3LPS YOU SL33P 4T D4Y YOU C4N H4V3 YOUR PL4US1BL3 D3N14B1L1T13S, W3 DO NOT H4V3 TH3 T1M3 TO FR1SK TH3M OUT OF YOU CURR3NTLY  
GC: TOMORROW 3V3RYTH1NG CH4NG3S SO 1T 1S N1C3 TO S33 YOU  
GC: 1 M34N 1F YOU 4R3 H3R3 FOR L4ST R3QU3STS 1 WOULD L1K3 TO L34V3 MY BODY TO COM3DY 4ND MY L4ST W1LL 4ND T3ST4M3NT 1S NOT4R1Z3D UPON MY HUSKTOP  
CG: FOR FUCK’S SAKE, TEREZI, I AM NOT  
CG: ACTUALLY  
CG: INTERESTED  
CG: IN LOSING YOU RIGHT NOW.  
CG: SEE ALL THAT? SEE ALL THAT GODDAMN EMOTIONAL AVAILABILITY??  
CG: TEREZI?  
CG: FUCK. SHIT FUCK. DOUBLE SHIT BULGE PUS.  
CG: I DIDN’T MEAN TO MAKE THIS AS HEINOUSLY AWKWARD AS IT NOW IS, I JUST HAVE A NIGH-MAGICAL GIFT FOR IT, OK? I MEAN, DID YOU REALIZE THAT EVERY “TOMORROW WE MIGHT DIE” SPEECH IN MOVIES IS ACTUALLY A CROCK OF SHIT THAT DOESN’T WORK IN REAL LIFE?  
CG: I JUST WANTED TO TELL YOU  
CG: THAT YOU ARE  
CG: A THING.  
CG: YOU ARE DEFINITELY  
CG: A THING.  
CG: TO ME.  
GC: K4RK4T  
CG: YEAH.  
GC: 1 4M NOT TH3 ON3 WHOM YOU SHOULD B3 T3LL1NG 1S 4 TH1NG  
GC: TOMORROW W3 M1GHT D13 4ND 1 W4NT YOU TO KNOW TH4T SOM3WH3R3 OUT TH3R3 1S 4 TROLL WHO 1 TH1NK W1LL N3V3R B3 4 M3SS14H  
CG: TEREZI.  
GC: Y3S  
CG: ARE YOU QUOTING FAMED TROLL MUSICAL THE SOUND OF MUCUS.  
GC: Y3S  
CG: YOU DISGUST ME.  
GC: TH3R3 1S 4 LOT TH4T H4S H4PP3N3D 4ND 4LL 1 R34LLY W4NT TO DO 1S S1T DOWN 4ND T4LK TO YOU 4BOUT 1T BUT W3 H4V3 US3D UP THR33 M1NUT3S 4LR34DY!!  
GC: 1 4M 4 PR3TTY 3XC3LL3NT FR13ND  
GC: BUT 1T H4S B33N 4 LONG WH1L3 S1NC3 1T W4S 34SY FOR M3 TO B3 G3NTL3  
GC: OR K1ND  
GC: TO TH3 ON3 P3RSON 1D W4NT3D TO B3  
GC: G3N3R4LLY B3C4US3 TH3Y 4R3, 1N F4CT, 4 G1G4NT1C CLOWN DOUCH3B4G WHOS3 3V3RY 4CT1ON 1S C4LCUL4T3D TO M4K3 M3 M4D FOR SOM3 F4THOML3SS FUCK1NG R34SON  
GC: SO 1 4M 4BOUT TO P4SS YOU OV3R  
GC: YOU H4V3 4BOUT S3V3N M1NUT3S  
GC: (1N H34V3N!!!)  
CG: EAT A TUMOUR AND CHOKE, THIS WAS NOT PART OF THE PLAN.  
CG: I AM NOT EVEN SLIGHTLY FUCKING READY, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING. TEREZI, I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’D SAY TO HIM.  
GC: DO NOT 3V3N GO 1NTO ON3 OF YOUR R1D1CULOUS M34ND3R1NG L34D-UPS  
GC: JUST TYP3 TH3 SYMBOL YOU H4V3 B33N W4NT1NG TO TYP3 TO H1M FOR 4 V3RY LONG T1M3  
GC: YOU KNOW  
GC: TH3 D14MOND SH4P3D ON3!  
GC: 1TS S1MPL3  
CG: OH, MY FUCKING GOD.  
CG: TEREZI, NO. I CAME TO TALK TO YOU. THERE WAS A PURPOSE HERE. CAPTOR OFFERED TO WRING MY BULGE OFF IF I DIDN’T MEET HIS MISSION PARAMETERS. YOU AND I HAVE TO TALK. I CAN’T DO THIS. I’VE LEFT IT TOO LONG, HE DOESN’T EVEN.  
GC: K4RK4T  
GC: YOU 4LR34DY S41D 3V3RYTH1NG 4ND TH3R3 4R3 ST1LL CH4NG3S 1N M3 YOU H4V3 NOT H4D T1M3 TO P4RS3  
CG: IF THIS IS ABOUT SOME DISTASTEFULLY HORSESHIT IDEA THAT YOU HAVE SOMEHOW TRANSFORMED INTO SOMEONE I WOULD HAVE NO INTEREST IN, TAKE YOUR BRAIN OUT AND DROPKICK IT.  
CG: I’VE CHANGED. YOU’VE CHANGED. THERE IS NO POINT OF DREADFUL YOU COULD REACH THAT I WOULDN’T WANT TO ASPIRE TO, OK? IS THAT ROMANCE ENOUGH?? I WILL NEVER NOT BE BEGGING ON MY KNEES IN FRONT OF YOU NO MATTER HOW GLAND-ROTTINGLY AWFUL YOU BECOME.  
CG: BEHOLD THE ROTTEN DEPTHS OF ME:  
GC: NO NO NO DO NOT M4K3 WH4T3V3R SYMBOL YOU 4R3 4BOUT TO M4K3  
GC: TH3R3 ONC3 W4S 4 T1M3 WH3N 1 W4NT3D NOTH1NG MOR3 TH4N TO S33 1T  
CG: FUCK. MY. LIFE.  
CG: NOT ANY MORE?  
GC: YOU 4WFUL N1NNY!!!  
GC: 1 4M NOT GO1NG TO S4Y 1T TH1S T1M3 UNT1L 1 C4N M4K3 MY TRULY SMOOV3 MOV3S FROND TO NOS3 4T YOU, 1 C4NNOT DO WH4T 1 H4V3 TO DO 1F YOU 4R3 P4RT OF MY ST4K3S  
GC: BUT WH4T3V3R H4PP3NS 4ND WH4T3V3R 1 DO NOTH1NG W1LL 3V3R CH4NG3 TH3 F4CT  
GC: TH4T YOU  
GC: 4R3 D3F1N1T3LY MY TH1NG >:]  
GC: SO HUP HUP!!!

You manage to yank away your husktop, disconnect the connector worm, barge out of your quarters and are hammering on Gamzee’s in record time. This is thankfully one of those times where he is too bored to do anything but open the lock for you, and you are elbowing your way inside and ladling his arms full of husktop before you can smell his protest.

“There!” you say, beside yourself, absurdly near grief. “About six minutes, you opprobrious douchebag. Here is me doing motherfucking jack for you! If you do not take full advantage of the situation, I will slice a hole in your front and floss your ribs with your own intestines.”

Then you turn on your heel and walk the long few feet back to your quarters, ricocheting inside and slumping down at your chair. There is a large pan-ache collecting behind one dead eye, burning through the nerve with the ghost of old pain. You would just like to crawl into the sopor and sleep now, sleep as though you could sleep forever, but you cannot drag yourself out of your chair. You wonder why you feel ridiculously empty: talking to Karkat has reset you somehow, but you don’t know to what or to who.

Ten minutes later your door whooshes open. You don’t bother to look up. Gamzee clatters your husktop down on your desk untidily without so much as a _how d’you do,_ and then you feel him crouching in front of you, taking your hands and directing your palmfurrows upwards.

You look at him, properly, at his familiar face. Overfamiliar by now, in fact, in this terrible pressure-boiler the only face more sniffable would be your sister’s. You behold his big homely jaw, his hard broad bones, his sharp nasal ridge. His eyes smell a soft shiny yellow: not glazed with sopor nor angry beyond reason.

“We have a very long night tomorrow,” you hear yourself say. “You do not need to actually say anything, if you were going to attempt. You should prepare your uniform and sleep and fix up your facepaint, it is looking sloppy and ridiculous. Make sure your dress uniform is prepared too, we have to change into them after to attend the dinner -- ”

“Terezi,” he says.

You cannot actually recall the last time he said your name. 

“All manner of thing,” he says, “is gonna be mother fucking well, baby girl.” 

Gamzee kisses the pad of your thenar muscles, the soft mounds that cover your tendons. He kisses the very center over the nerve that runs up from your wrist. He kisses one thumb first, then the other. His lips are brushed still and unmoving over the crease of each joint, and then he mouths the soft flap of skin that stretches between your finger and thumb. You stare at the top of his messy head as he cups your hands together and dots his mouth over each knuckle, only stopping when a hard shudder runs through you that you can’t quell.

  


  


“Subjugglator,” you say, “is there a reason you are macking on my digits?”

His tongue wrinkles at your nailbed, orange horns bobbing nearly in your lap. For some reason it’s _that_ sight which makes you nearly blush. “Damn,” he says, “shit, you’re correct, I don’t even know where these have up and been.”

“Did he ask you?”

His head angles up so that he peeks at you -- nearly shy, what has the universe come to -- through a fine veil of dark tangles. On his face is a look of fierce exultation. “Nah, legislacerator,” he says. “My best motherfucker just _told.”_

Young love is terrible. You find yourself wearily petting his chin, something genetically related to a smile on your face only tireder. There is his pale quadrant all nice and full, there are all his romantic woes laid to rest. Perhaps from now on he will cut you some slack, and you can continue on a little more affably than before. There is nothing left for either of you to want. “Disgusting,” you say. “You will be up to your gizzard in diamond emoticons. I will have to bear the brunt of your being a newlyrail. Go to sleep, Mr. Makara.”

After a long while his cool breath leaves your fingers and he stands by the door, perfectly blank, a sudden hesitation between you both. Awkwardness. You really shouldn’t be; you two have caused each other more personal grief and deep-tissue contusion over the past few seasons than deserves distance. “Morning, legal evil,” he says.

“Good morning, clown crank.”

It is intimacy without friendship.

When the door shuts behind him you strip off your clothes and you haul yourself into the recuperacoon, not bothering to tuck things back into your sylladex nor to even fold jackets over your chair. You take the hands that he kissed and are not certain where to put them, feeling unreal. Exhausted and simultaneously, absurdly sleepless, you end up leaning out of your recuperacoon for the palmhusk and wiping your hands clean to use it:

\-- gallowsCalibrator [GC] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG]! --

GC: 1N TH3 OLD D4YS TH3 L3G1SL4C3R4TOR WOULD S3ND FORM4L S1GN4L OF 1NT3NT  
GC: TH3 N3W D4YS 4R3 W4Y MOR3 G4UCH3  
GC: 1N 4NY C4S3!  
GC: TOMORROW 1 4M COM1NG FOR YOU

\-- this user has blocked your account! --

For the last time here, you let the sopor lull you to a deep and dreamless sleep.

  


* * *

  
On the night of Tavros Nitram’s trial, you put on your uniform like a suit of armour. You tidy your hair. You wipe your glasses until they smell as shiny as fresh waxy fruit. In the hallways everyone is busy and bustling, but they all stop their preparations to do a curious thing: they salute you. Some of them smile at you, and some of them do not. Each time one of your cohort raises their hand to their head -- legislacerators and cultists alike, albeit the subjugglators sometimes add a grave _whoop, whoop_ \-- you feel tight and clutchy in your guts. It is a strange mix of adrenaline and sorrow. Many of these trolls were very unkind to you! A percentage of them may love the tale if you die. For plenty more you have won their respect in ways that don’t sit easily. You always salute back.

You meet Trainee Velher on the stairs, not a curl out of place as you both pause. After a moment her hand glides up to touch her temple in salutation, the same shared-secret smile tugging at her seedflap. “Good luck for tonight, Legislacerator,” she says.

“This is a court case, Subjugglator, and I am not a gamblignant,” you say, knowing you sound a bit starchy. “Luck is not on the agenda!”

“Still,” she says, and horror of horrors, she reaches out to fix your collar. When it is smoothed out to her particular specifications, she knocks off that airy, careless salute again. You wonder where she and her ill-fated partner will be sent. You do not respect Velher, but she is too clever to be wasted policing bureaucretins. “I hope things turn out as intended.”

“Oh, so do I! But to _whose_ intention?”

Velher just laughs. Then she utters that particularly bizarre Messiah shibboleth at you -- “Family,” -- and continues on her way.

You do not attend the evening meal, and you do not attend the briefing afterwards. As far as you are concerned, there is nothing anyone can tell you any more about this court case. Instead you hang around outside the makeshift courtblock, in the little alcove that the P.A.C. cordoned off for all off-block prosecutorial purposes, and you wait for your call inside. You go over your case notes, and you do something comforting that you have not done for a long time: you slide a stick of red chalk out of your modus and you suck it like a sweet. The end hangs out your mouth like a tar-transfer nicotine cylinder. You are classy as hell.

At this point in your relationship, you can tell when something is wrong with Gamzee. You can actually tell _before_ he rounds the corner, by the little frizzes of fearmongering he gives off when he is trying to tamp his powers down. His appearance confirms it. He shambles towards you like the way he shambled towards your culling exam, inexorable, his gaze devoid of anything you can sniff.

You spit out the chalk in a flurry of scarlet grub dyes and lean on your cane, trying to guess at the scents on him instead, his hands -- his fingers are covered in a dry, powdery stain, pale brown. 

“You went to see Tavros,” you say.

Gamzee stops before you. The look he gives you is long and considering. You stand apart like strangers, and in that blankness is more than Tavros. “Funniest fucking thing,” he says, “this thing is SO MOTHER FUCKING FUNNY. Was just trying to give my bro a bitchtits hug. Just a little bro squeeze. Get a comfort on.”

“His back is immaterial, we can keep his back hidden -- ”

“His back is a _god damn church anathema!_ His back is a _mother fucking blasphemy,_ does your paltry-ass Culling Law exam mark count for FUCK ALL?”

Your bloodpusher stills. You say softly, “If you have hurt him -- ”

“Hurt my _fucking Tavbro?”_ Gamzee is leaning in now, sour and hoarse. “Hurt my brownblooded wing-fucked brother? Rip those heretical slimebuds off his backplate, slit his pipes so nobody knows he was a _GOD DAMN ILL-FAVOURED OMEN?_ Aw, girl, _girl.”_

He stretches out one long arm as you try to force past him, already convinced that in the brig lies the beaten corpse of Tavros Nitram. You bounce off his forearm. “That is not,” he says, “what this shit’s about. SHIT’S OF A DIFFERENT MOTHERFUCKIN’ CONCERN, Terecita.”

You back away from his arm, watching as he cracks his knuckles, then slowly pops the ones in his jaw. It sounds like dry twigs being stomped upon. “Had a tip-off last night,” says Gamzee, rolling and stretching his throatstem. “Had the big mothergrub of all tip-offs. Two in partic. Damn, and there was I feeling GUT-GUILT for the faithless sin of downloading your husktop’s datashell.”

“You did _what?”_

“Got a tip-off after,” he says, “tipped as shit, tip so sharp it drew the blood and pierced the ear. Little bit of coolant grub and a little bit of sopor mix up to be one motherfucking poison cocktail, did you know that? Did you know your search history’s so full of coolant grubbage you should _OPEN UP A MOTHERFUCKING INFO DESK?”_

“Gamzee!” You are flushed and clammy. “Gamzee, you fucking fool, I got a tip-off to try and _kill_ you, do you really think I would? Do you really think I would in that _method?_ I was following it up, you ginormous idiot, I was trying to -- ”

“Was I going to find out,” says your partner, “was my pan to behold BEFORE or mother fucking AFTER, this relevatory secret keeping you’ve been doing up in this bitch -- was I going to find out AFTER, or was I going to find out FUCKING BEFORE, that a spider _LEFT MY BOY TO DIE?”_

You duck the club as it whistles overhead. Your canesword you slide out of its sheath, and it meets the second blow in a shower of sparks. You are beside yourself with anger and the stupid, impotent uselessness of it all, of _everything you have done,_ of the senselessness -- “Who do you think I came to arrest?” you snap. “Who do you think is going to go under suspicion tonight? You could have known! You simply didn’t want to!”

“Deal’s off,” he says. “You’re never going to see my longhorned brother survive. It is just another SQUEAKBEAST and MEWBEAST game you’re playing with Serket, just another fucking game you are scoring up in that pompous-ass pan of yours. When do your _god damn games stop,_ Terecita?”

“When are you going to _finally believe what I say?”_

It is your blows that now rain down upon him, forcing him back. Gamzee is forced to parry, not defend, one club held out as a makeshift shield as you slash over and over. “Why do you take everything I do in the worst of faith?” you say. “Why do you undermine me at every turn? Why do you have to ruin everything with your selfish, one-eyed, megalomaniac _zealotry?”_

“Shut your distasteful fucking mouth, I ain’t interested,” he says, and he raises his club before you slide your blade to his ribs.

“What did I do,” you say, and it tumbles out your mouth unbidden, “to make you hate me?”

  


  


Your sword presses at the side of his shirt, just underneath a rib so you can ease it up and into his oxygen sponges. It pins down his club; a jerk upwards from him would force your sword into his body, and without realising you have fisted your other hand in his shirt. Your faces are very close. You are angry. God, you are angry! You are angry and you are scared, and all that chants in your brain is a long litany of: _I am through with you. I am through with you._

A funny cast comes over his face. An odd, infuriating smile touches his lips.

“You think this is motherfuckin’ hate?” he says softly. “The girl thinks it’s some motherfucking pitch-black waxing here. The GIRL _THINKS_ THERE IS SOME WICKED SPADES GOING ON. Girl thinks that when she first got tickets to the Dark Carnival my name got printed on hers, SO DESPERATE IS THE MOTHER FUCKING GIRL.”

“You disgust me,” you say, and you score a a soft line of indigo on him. “You are simply proving my point.”

“How long you been thinking this is what heats my slime, Terecita?” he says. “How long you been having these little feverish thoughts, that I been driven all along by nudging bulge at the thought of your spine knobbles?”

“You are inept at being crass,” you say, but there is that mean, humiliated heat inside you anyway. “You know full well that if this was a matter of quadrants, Mr. Makara, I did not want one that filled buckets.”

“Oh, I know what you wanted,” says Gamzee, and his voice is low and oily and ugly again. “I know what you _mother fucking wanted._ You wanted me in a collar and to heel and to roll over like a dumb barkbeast, didn’t you know? You told me to kill a troll and I _mother fuckin’ killed a troll,_ gotta thank you for that, helped me realise my calling. My wicked lifelong calling. Helped me know the ins and outs of what subjugglate means, I’ll thank you for that one. You are to be thanked.”

“I never wanted to hurt you, either. You delude yourself harder over me than you do over your silly clown religion -- ”

“Aw, girl,” he says, “the sharpest motherfucking cut,” and he leans himself into your sword. Gamzee presses his club down so that your blade huddles itself a little closer, melting into his epidermals through the growing slit in his shirt, nudging inside a little more with each movement. His smile is wide and wild and mocking. “Get schoolfed, my legislacerative parasite. I bet it _KEPT YOU THE FUCK AWAKE,_ thinking about hurting me. I bet that kept your hand busy.”

“Shut _up!”_ This is not your best comeback.

“You’ve been racking your pan, haven’t you,” says the subjugglator. “You’ve been wanting to fucking think that I want to touch your skinny titless stick of a body, getting all hatehappy with your lumpy little ass? You been _kicking the wicked imagination_ about how we could settle down, loathe it out, till death do we mother fucking part?”

“If you think I ever thought you would be my rival,” you say, knowing you are squirming with discomfort and distress, “you are tragically incorrect. You are _stupid!_ I never stopped thinking you were stupid, it is brutally obvious you are stupid! You can play at being clever all you like, it will never change the fact that you are a stupid, sulky little wiggler with abandonment issues and the mystifying idea that he is hot shit -- ”

“So stupid you wanted to shoosh me,” he says, sing-song. “So stupid you wanted to get your motherfucking pacify on, only you couldn’t pacify a corpse-dusted stiff, could you now? Watching you go through the motions broke my chucklebox, baby girl, you just tried -- so -- _hard_ \-- ”

You press in your sword until he lets out a grunt of pain, and with your free hand you slap him hard across the face. It echoes in your alcove, and you want to record the sound so that you can hear it over and over like music. _His_ free hand is suddenly sliding up your waist as though your sword isn’t slowly penetrating his body, like his blood isn’t dripping and slippery over his thorax.

“This what you wanted?” he says. Those long fingers trail up your uniform and beneath your vest, resting over a vestigial nutrient gland. He cups what he can of it, and you know you are teal to the tips of your aural shells. It is not out of shame: you have gone out of your body, you think, and you are now your sword. “Think I wanted to get my hands on your motherfucking _anatomy?”_

Then Gamzee’s hand is at your other breast, fingers tracing the outline, pressing into its curve until the sensation is painful. You feel sick and hot. “I wouldn’t touch you,” he murmurs, “if every messiah gave me the rude info that it was miraculous prophetical necessity, me touching you. I would _apostate_ before I motherfucking _defiled myself_ with your person.”

You say levelly, “So why are you grabbing my boobs?”

This question gives him pause. He looks down at your chest, then at you, and you take the opportunity to yank your rapier out of his ribs. Only the tip had sunk in, but that is more than enough to have him hiss in pain and have you flee to the sanctuary of the opposite wall. The sword you wipe clean and sheath back into your cane, leaning it against the alcove seats as you behold each other.

Your anger transmutes into something cleaner; now that you two have some distance, you can think. Your brain ceases hiccoughing and settles back into motion, a machine that can take you where you finally have to go.

“Pale for you,” you say steadily, and you raise your hands thumb to thumb and finger to finger: the diamond. “Possibly always pale for you, Mr. Makara. But as far as I am concerned you may break your oath and go and get yourself killed. I really hope you do, you know, it would be doing me a favour. You are not my business, as you have told me time and time again! _I_ will be in the courtroom, trying to save Tavros’s life.”

Gamzee bleeds. You feel strange about it, queasy up in your chest where he touched you.

“You taught me how to play this miserable fucking game,” he says.

“I taught you lots of things,” you say. “Most of which you had no intention of learning. The opposite also holds true.”

That prompts a faint, wry smirk. He touches his fingers to the growing wet patch on his shirt, and he absently combs the blood back into his hair. You say: “Have your freedom from me, Mr. Grape Faygo. You can leave and carry out your suicidal rescue plan. We are done, our points have been made, and I do not want to sniff you ever again.”

“You and me are too motherfucking wise to do this peaceably, Terecita,” he says, after a pause. “Think it’s easy as that?”

You say steadily, “All I ever had to do was let go.”

When he takes a tottering step towards you, you pick up your cane again. But Gamzee does not retrieve his club. He keeps one hand pressed over the seeping wound at his side, and he closes the distance between you both. All of a sudden you are dreadfully afraid that he will touch you again, and a tiny particle of you is afraid he will _not._ That tiny particle is a traitor, and the rest of you vows that should he touch your chest you will knee his junk.

But he doesn’t ready a blow. You smell no clusters of muscle tense. He says, “Quit the abhorrent lies you tell yourself, baby girl,” and he swiftly kisses you on the mouth. Then your partner makes his escape before you can even react.

“Mr. Makara!” you yell at his retreating back. “Stop making everything _complicated!”_

Gamzee’s footsteps have barely disappeared before the door to the courtblock opens, and you see a few worried faces of the P.A.C. peeking out. They are a little embarrassed-looking; you wonder how much of that last exchange they caught. “Legislacerator,” says one of them, “it’s time, his Honourable Tyranny wants you at the prosecution stand -- ”

“You have,” you say, “very bad timing.”

“Teach, where’s the Subjugglator?” one hisses, the picture of panic. You feel bad for them. They have all put blood, sweat and tears into making this run correctly. They could not be as disappointed at what is going to come than organisers at an upset quadrant ceremony. “Should we ask for five minutes delay?”

“Subjugglator Gamzee is going to be delayed a little longer than five minutes,” you say, and a dreadful kind of calm settles over you. It has been taken out of your hands. All you can do is what you set out to do, which is take your position as prosecutor. “I will simply have to begin without him!”

“But that’s completely out of protocol, we need to -- hey, Teach, _wait_ \-- ”

You push past the anxious faces of the P.A.C., and you go to meet your doom.

It is your first time walking into a live courtblock, and it is the first time you will be presiding over one. The sheer _activity_ astounds you. They have really managed to take this briefing room and change it into something worthy of the name! The floors have been coated in rough rock webbing, and the walls have been hung with three clashing insignia: the flag of the League of Legislacerators, depicting the scales, the eye and the noose; then the riotously-coloured hangings of the Mirthful Church, which are always painted at random and a little unpleasant. These clash beautifully with the bright cranberry flags for her dread Condescension, whose symbol is simply the trident. A huge vidscreen for evidence is attached to one wall. More webbing separates the official court benches from the gallery, and in the gallery every seat is filled.

For a few beautiful seconds you are six sweeps and astounded to be here. The first thing you hear is the bellowing of the disapproving Tyranny lodged inside his pit, clacking and screeching his displeasure. You want to smell everything at once. You sniff the empty gallows, and the lonely dais for the accused when they are brought in to receive judgement. The accused makes appearance fairly late in the game; they do not actually have any right of reply unless the prosecution asks for it. Before you stretches a sea of trolls all crisp with fresh uniforms, their mutters doubling in texture once you are seen striding forth without Gamzee. 

But what is this new addition, right at the back of the viewing stands? There is a peculiar, tinted-glass frame, and it is ringed all around with strange indigobloods. They’re not the _Executor’s._ The Ecstatic Exarch sits among the bevy of dark-hooded Church officials, all wearing insignia so high that you do not have a name for their rank. The Comedic Chaplain sits in front, looking uncharacteristically dismayed -- and at the very front the Advocate half-rises to her feet as you stride forward, partnerless and alone, taking your place at the prosecutorial bench.

Before Parlet can say a word, one of the cohort-nominated court officials has already warbled, “All rise as his Honourable Tyranny begins session!”

There is a clatter as everyone rises, and you stand behind the bench feeling sparks slowly drift to your fingers and toes. You are beyond fear; you are beyond much of anything. His Honourable Tyranny is bigger, redder and spikier than you’d imagined, though you also suppose it differs from each Tyranny to Tyranny. For the purposes of the Cruellest Bar, his Tyranny is regarded as one legal entity no matter which member of the species is presiding, and really there is no discernable difference between them.

His Honourable Tyranny lets out a selection of ear-splitting screeches, tossing his huge horned head around in either annoyance or legal jubilation. You have never smelled anything quite so urgently _red._ Crimson and coal, like a bonfire: black brackish blood underneath big plates of scarlet chitin. Once he has finished everyone bows, a mark of respect for the Imperial Condescension, and there is a great shuffling sound as everyone sits back down. 

The court official warbles even more as they announce, “The prosecution will begin their -- her opening statement!”

Excepting the end statement, the opener is the most dangerous time for prosecution. If his Tyranny takes an immediate dislike to you, he will remove you immediately with a swipe of his unmerciful claw. At that point the back-up prosecution team -- two girls in the front row, who you can sniff leaning forward a little intently -- will take over. Will his Honourable Tyranny dislike the deviation, if he was expecting a prosecutorial pair? Will his terrible claw shear you in half, and will both of those halves go into his hungry maw? It is the second-best way you’d hoped to go.

A hush falls over the room. Numerous breaths are held. Your footsteps seem to be very loud as you mount the steps before the pit where your judicious monster is kept, and you let him get his fill of you as you stand there. The first few moments are very important. You had been planning on prodding Gamzee in the ribs to make sure he tried to be as inoffensive as possible, but -- he is not here. He will not be present. You have a feeling your partner wouldn’t have kissed you unless it was a kiss goodbye.

This is your territory now. As his Tyranny nudges a claw towards you, you revert to your tradition: you reach out and you give him a long judicious lick. What do you really have to lose? Nobody in the audience even dares hiccup in shock. His Tyrannical plating is a little nubbly to the linguals, not smooth as you had once imagined, but it tastes like chilli and paprika and is very satisfying to tongue. His Honourable Tyranny appears to give this some thought, and then gives a sort of chirpy noise which you assume means acceptance.

Some trolls breathe out. The two prosecutorial hopefuls sit back, less hopeful. You gesture to one of the P.A.C., huddled at their bench smelling of more woe than your nostrils can bear, and one scuttles up to hand you a remote-locust. You may begin.

“My Honourable Tyranny!” Is that really your voice? You have no idea how it is coming out of you. “Assembled gentletrolls and officials of the courtblock! I stand before you with an indictment of high heresy.” 

This is innocuous enough. “The indictment sets forth that one Private Tavros Nitram, cavalreaper of the First Mobile Trainee Unit, received prohibited materials with the intent to use them against our dread Empress of the Alternian Empire. These materials included information that has been clearly ranked as sensitive, high-clearance and heretical by the rubric of the Covertraumatic Specialists. The indictment sets forth that Private Tavros Nitram is a traitor to his species, to his Empress, and to his Empire!”

As opening statements go, this is not a doozy. You really do have a choice; you _could_ continue with your first draft, set carefully next to the second draft in your sylladex. You could pull it out. You could send Tavros to whatever end it will get him, depending on what your indigoblooded companion is doing right now. You could, at least, cover your own sorry glutes.

This would be unjudicious. You are the law. This is what you stand for, and this is what makes you Terezi Pyrope. You may be a terrible friend, mediocre at romance and apparently skinny-butted, but you are the _mother fucking LAW._

“I would like to make a more correct indictment,” you say. “I would like to inform you all that Private Tavros Nitram received prohibited materials at the behest of a superior in the Intelligence department, who used him as an information cache to avoid detection themselves. I would like to moot that Private Nitram, as a lower bloodcaste, lower-ranked and part of a lower military department, was subject to entrapment by his superior through trickery and intimidation. Private Nitram was sent these files by the true enemy of our species, our Empress and our Empire: a Covertraumatic operative and conspirator by the name of Vriska Serket!”

You thumb the remote-locust, and there appears a still of Vriska on the screen in all her glory: eyepatched, wild-haired, smirking for her identification image, and you would break a little had you not broken a very long time ago. You are the law. The court is in a hubbub swiftly transforming into an uproar, and when you meet the Brigadier-General’s gaze she is rubbing one temple. You could not be flying higher than if you had ground up justice to a fine powder and snorted it up one nostril.

“Order!” says the court official, as his Honourable Tyranny hoots and shrieks his displeasure. “His Honourable Tyranny _will_ have order!”

You raise your voice above the din: “I would like to call upon -- ”

They never give you the opportunity to call upon anyone. A klaxon blares in the courtblock, echoing around the _Executor._ One of the higher-ups is tapping furiously on a tablet, calling out a row behind from Parlet: “General! We have reports that the ship’s security has been breached!”

_“What?”_

“The brig’s under attack, sir, we’re trying to secure the area -- ”

Faster than you thought she could move, the Advocate vaults over the dividing wall and storms up the dais. She is really rather marvellous in a rage: two high, cold spots of copper blue in her cheeks, coattails flapping, snatching the spare remote-locust from the P.A.C.’s bench without even a second thought. “I want a full report!” she snaps. “Cohort trainees, you are not to leave this area! All security personnel report to the prison level with haste, and I want a visual three minutes ago.”

Vriska’s face swims as the Brigadier-General fiddles with the controls. The uproar has graduated to its final form, which is mayhem. Some of the _Executor’s_ officers are vacating the premises entirely as others form a perimeter around the room, subjugglators and legislacerators alike pulling their strifekind out with numerous puffs of burnt ozone. For you it is dreamlike; you smell the feed from the brig corridors as the screen comes into definition, and you wait for Gamzee’s entrance. You had not had time to think about it before: you are about to watch him die.

Smoke obscures the screen. At the end of the hallway you can make out the holding-cell that bars your accused, waiting for the bailiffs to bring him through to trial. There is a staticky scream as one of the prison guards is tossed the entire length of the hallway, landing with a sickening crack on the floor. There are Tavros’s horns, his hands wrapped around the bars as he obviously tries to make out what is going on; the peppering of laser ammunition as another few guards take potshots, one stumbling out of the smoke before his head is cleaved from his body --

It is not Gamzee who emerges from the clearing smoke, scimitar in hand and dripping blood. It’s your Scourge Sister.

Eight motes of light obscure the screen as she tosses something to the ground: she’s thrown the Octet, and the audio cuts out momentarily with a terrific clatter. Blood squirts out from some location almost comedically, a long violet-blue spray that gets on her face. You can see her squint of disgust as she wipes it off on her sleeve, the steel of her implanted arm flashing as she deals with another officer. She is strangely small in comparison: skinny, busy, indefatigable. Another guard skids down the other side of the hallway and is caught by Tavros’s outstretched fingers, and he is held up against the bars by the neck. More fighting obscures what happens, except that then the troll is slumped on the floor.

“Shoot to disarm,” Parlet’s saying into a headset. “This is an order, I don’t give a damn what the priests are saying, I want her interrogation-ready.”

Vriska has reached Tavros’s cell, and she is swiping a keycard in the lock -- once, to no avail. Twice to no avail and some swearing you can hear even over the poor-quality audio, an audible _Fuck!!!!!!!!_ that has exactly eight exclamation marks to it. At the third the bars slide open, and when the brownblooded cavalreaper emerges he backhands her clean across the face. 

No trouble to her; she backhands him hard in return. You can see them standing in front of each other, Vriska’s shoulders heaving with either exertion or annoyance, and then her sword drops and her arms are suddenly flung around his neck. They share a kiss that is as awkward as it is desperate, the kiss of two people who have never mutually smooched. You can’t tell its colour. She is murmuring something, but you only catch incoherent snatches: “ -- alw -- co -- yo -- ” before he presses her face to his shoulder. They hold each other tight. They hold each other as though this is the time, place or situation to hold each other, right until the noise of gunfire in the distance. Whatever his response is you cannot discern; instead the eight pinpoints of the Octet flare again, and smoke clouds out the camera’s lens.

The Advocate’s saying, “I want lockdown on the ship, secure both levels above and below -- ” 

A final figure appears in the smoke like a wraith. When it clears, there is no sign of either Vriska or Tavros; just Gamzee Makara, a club in each hand and looking wildly around him. In the end he stares up directly at the security feed, and his expression smells like pure desolace.

There is no force available that could calm your cohort after _that:_ certainly not the plaintive call from the court official, nor the snorts and snarls from his Honourable Tyranny. Everyone is talking at the tops of their squawkblisters, and there appears to be an argument going on between the Exarch and the hooded Church representatives guarding their precious glass prison. Someone is laughing hysterically: a high, delighted cackle, going on and on as though they have heard the funniest joke in the world. Someone else is calling your name and jogging your shoulder. You realise that the second sound comes from your commander, and the first sound is coming from you.

The viewing screen flares again. Vriska Serket’s face is now displayed in high definition, the worst of the blood wiped off. She is fiddling with whatever communication device she is using, like someone recording a casual film to put on CruelTube, and she steps away. Her eye is alight, blue on gold, space rippling behind her in backdrop from wherever the hell she’s transmitting this from. One of the officers says, “Sir, she’s jacked our system -- ” before Parlet cuts in, “Yes, I _realise -- ”_

From the entire room, the mayhem is still in various flavours of hubbub until the Exarch howls: “SHUT the **_FUCK_** UP.” This garners universal silence.

On the screen, Vriska steps back. You can now hear everything, right down to the pleased click of her tongue. You cannot remember the last time you saw her this way: glowing with adrenaline and victory, lit from within as brightly as if she’d swallowed a firework. You can see Tavros behind her in a state of happy bemusement, holding -- of all things! -- his tiny fairybull lusus in his arms. Tinkerbull flutters away and settles on his horn. 

His kidnapper -- rescuer -- crosses her arms behind her back, and she gives the camera a sharp white smile. “This is addressed to the _Executor,”_ she says, “though you’d better pass it on to the rest of the Empire, because my name is Vriska Serket and I want every troll to hear what I’ve got to say. Sorry about your brig and officers, _Executor,_ but you picked the short straw this time around.”

There is laughter in her voice, and a cold, hard strain of confidence. Nobody can be sure of themselves like Vriska is sure of herself. When she is like this, it is almost as though everything not _her_ is less real, like she sucks reality away from the surroundings and stores it up in her smirk. “So!” she says brightly. “You’re all living a lie. I can’t believe it took me all this time to work it out, but I did my homework and we are. How does it feel? What’s it like for you, dumb slaves to a system that was made to only serve one person? You know, I’ve got this saying: _shame on you if you fool me once, I’m an unbelievable fucking idiot if you fool me my entire existence!”_

She spreads her hands out in front of her. “Sure. I get it. Fraudulent is easy. I bet you’re all saying right now, ‘But Vriska, I’m a stupid idiot who likes being comfortable, this is my deal!’ _Wrong._ The Condescension is lying to you. All your superiors are lying to you. You’re lying to yourself right _now_. You don’t have to live this way! You don’t have to be told what to do by the Condesce, by the Empire, by the stupid -- fucking -- _hemosystem!”_

Your bloodpusher is in your throat. “I mean, holy shit!” she continues. “Have you never sat down and thought to yourself, ‘ranking people by their blood colour is the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard of’? Sure you have. Took me a while to get it, I guess. Know how I rank people now? By how much they _win.”_

“Uh,” says Tavros, “or, what you mean to say is, you’d prefer a hierarchy, or a tiered system or such, where people’s self-worth and worth in general, isn’t quite so arbitrary -- ”

 _“Pupa._ Who’s talking, me or you?”

“Well,” he says, “I would cut in, and maybe say some heartening words of encouragement, or comfort, to people out there who need it, but, uh, I’m -- I don’t really enjoy public speaking. I’m sorry. Please don’t judge me too much, on that. And please don’t judge Vriska too much, if her thesis here is sounding more like, or I mean resembling, that of a jerk.”

“Thanks for approximately _nothing,_ Pupa.”

“It’s true, Vriska.”

“This is my second-in-command, Tavros Nitram!” she tells the camera, gesturing to him and not looking very much interested in people’s self-worth. But her eye burns like blue fire as she smiles. “Pupa, I think that you need to help everyone back home understand who we are a little more in-depth. Get my drift?”

He gets her drift. Tavros takes the edge of his shirt and pulls it over his head, revealing an impressive collection of abdominal and pectoral muscles. Vriska takes the end of his chest bandage and unwinds him like a present as he slowly turns around, shy but grotesquely proud, somehow. He is left standing with his back presented to the camera, face half-turned as though squinting to see an audience reaction he can never catch. 

There are the wingbuds, dribbling fluid. When he flexes the muscles surrounding them they shiver, and in the courtblock someone actually screams. Now there is movement from the crowd in the gallery. You are aware of the hooded subjugglators at the back beginning to pick their way through the seats.

“Pupa is heir to the troll all history books called the Summoner!” she says, as he hastily wrestles his singlet back on. “I’m the heir to the Marquise Spinneret Mindfang, greatest pirate who ever lived. I’m making the same choice she did: freedom. I’m choosing the right thing. I’m choosing to declare war on this whole sorry Alternian Empire!”

And she flicks both middle fingers at the screen.

  


  


“Fuck your Empress! Fuck your Church! Fuck your laws, fuck your wars, fuck your system!” she says. “Look out, bitches, here we come!”

The feed crackles, then goes dark.

A lot of things happen at once. The strange Messiahs are already clustering by the doorways, as though it is now their turn to try to contain a truly egregious piece of blasphemy. There is a commotion over by one of the doors, and who should you sniff but Gamzee Makara, flanked by a bunch of security officers and not happy about it. 

“I want every trainee out of here and to the level four briefing room!” The Brigadier-General’s voice lifts above the crowd like a silver sword. She taps her communicator. “To every troll aboard the _Executor:_ This is a code alpha clearance breakdown! We are closing down inter-ship communications! If I see anyone secreting a recording of what just went down, I will be your personal judge, jury and executioner -- ”

You try to beat your way through the streams of people leaving the room. Not even shin-drubbing works in this instance. His Honourable Tyranny howls and slams his giant fists down on the dais, and you are pushing your way towards your wayward partner even as you are suddenly lifted off the floor. One of your arms is pinned painfully behind your back by someone who smells like rich, velvety huckleberries, and you are held in midair by one of the mysterious Church officials.

“Excuse me!” You are not happy either. “My personal freedoms are being infringed upon! I received an order from my superior! Let me go!”

None of this is listened to, unfortunately. As the crowd begins to thin, you see that Gamzee is in much the same position, albeit his security team appears to be arguing the toss with three large, indigo-robed Subjugglators. Yours is wrenching your arm back so hard you worry it will pop out of its socket: thankfully, you have been scrapping so often in the past few seasons that you are used to the situation of being manhandled. Unfortunately, the moment that your own subjugglator partner sees you, his expression goes all blank and flat and you know he is about to make this weird.

_“Makara!”_

It’s not you. It is, surprisingly, the Ecstatic Exarch, diving in right before your partner can throw a punch. She grabs him by the aural shell and gives him a little shake, which would be utterly hilarious in any other situation. “What the _MOTHER_ of _FUCK_ were you doing? Do you have your contemplate on regarding the _shit you’ve done?_ I am going to take a court martial and I will shove it up your -- ”

“Exarch,” says the indigoblood holding you. You realise that you have all been penned by a ring of the strange, hooded clown priests. “These two are now placed under Church arrest.”

“Cardinal, this is not a fuckin’ ecumenical matter,” she says.

“Everyone here will be handled by the Mirthful Messiahs,” repeats your captor, “but these two are under church arrest. They are an obvious part of the conspiracy.”

To add to this growing clusterfuck, the Advocate’s voice joins the fray. It sounds like it has spent a week in the thermal hull: “Release my trainees, please.”

“You heard me once.”

How highly-ranked _are_ these people? You are not actually certain of the specific ranks within the Church, considering there are approximately a billion, and you are irritated with yourself that you didn’t look this up. Parlet says, “I will need statements from my commanding officers before I coordinate a cover-up, your Grace. I would also like an assurance my ship is not about to be liquidated.”

“This is a Church matter, tealblood, I make no assurances and tell no lies.”

“You can’t wipe out the entirety of the Church and the Bar’s trainees for a _cover-up._ This will not be a secret that much longer.”

“They are only one generation,” says the Cardinal. “In ten sweeps we’ll have more. Why are you making me repeat myself, lawmaker?”

The Advocate goes rigid. “If you touch _any_ of my students,” she breathes, “if you touch any of them detrimentally, so help me, I’ll -- ”

The Ecstatic Exarch’s claw closes around the arm of Parlet’s jacket. “What Lizeth’s _saying,”_ she grinds out, “is that she knows the Church is gonna _feel merciful,_ especially if we up and comply with whatever they motherfucking see fit to do. Let me make the Church arrest for these two, your Grace, I will take ‘em into my care. I am not the soft fucking option.” 

You smell dismay on both of their skins, like sweat. The Brigadier-General looks as though she is about to do an acrobatic flip off whatever handle she can find. 

“We believe in miracles, Exarch,” the indigoblood, ignoring your squirms, “but not chance. This prosecutor’s invocation of the blueblood was no coincidence. The protocol breach is outweighed by the chance of conspiracy, and we will stamp the conspiracy out. They will receive a Church interrogation.”

“They’re barely more than wigglers!” Parlet bursts out. “This is ridiculous!”

“Two of their age bracket have just spat in the face of both Church and justice,” says the Cardinal. “That excuse does not hold water.”

“Mr. Makara and I are not part of a conspiracy,” you say, feeling that it is time to mount your own defense. “Gamzee went down to the prison block to check on our accused -- ” (it’s not precisely a lie) “ -- which, as you can see, was amply needed! I had already discovered Serket’s treachery and I was going to send her to the gallows. You can read my file! I have been tracking her crimes!”

“Makara,” says the Exarch, smelling like bones, facepaint and underlying relief, “tell me you corroborate this shitglutes story.”

For a moment you really wonder if he will corroborate this shitglutes story, but he simply says: “I was there for Pyrope’s motherfucking purposes, wasn’t I? Shit ain’t a MOTHER FUCKING conspiracy, unless it’s conspiracy to get the truth -- ”

“See? Arrest them, put ‘em both in my claws,” the Ecstatic Exarch tells the Cardinal. “They sound like there’s grounds for exoneration here. If I smell sin on their breath their bones will be ground to make my motherfucking bread! Your Grace, d’you think Lizeth and I would shelter a miserable shitting conspirator on _our_ ship?”

Your arm is becoming very sore from all this treatment. You wiggle like a pinned worm. “Vriska Serket is more devious than any of you know!” you say. “Unless you start tracking her now, you are going to _lose_ her -- ”

“Mindfang is not your concern.”

You say, “Mindfang is _completely_ my concern!”

The other Church officials glance at each other. One of the Cardinals next to Gamzee says patiently, “There is too much at stake. I do not think either of you understand the gravity of the situation. The indigo can live; he will undergo a less rigorous interrogation. The lowblood will receive a true interrogation, and her remains will be transferred back to -- ”

Gamzee reaches out a long hand to the hooded Cardinal, and he seizes his arm. Before you can shout for him to stop, he braces his other hand on the Cardinal’s shoulder and rips the arm off entirely. It is just like it was back in the culling exam, with the same incredible tearing noise. He adds a tooth-grinding crunch as he snaps the hooded troll’s neck, and then he approaches you with the ripped-off arm and the sound of a dozen high Church officials readying their weapons. 

There is easy murder in his face. The Exarch howls, _“Makara!”_

The sound of splintering saves your lives. From the tinted glass structure you had forgotten all about, a massive arm has punched directly _through_ it. The Cardinals are suddenly very still. This arm reaches around for some kind of unseen handle, and it opens a hatch; there is a rush of chilled air as the glass compartment opens. There are a couple of grunts as the biggest, oldest troll you have ever seen in your life emerges, pulling away tubes and needles feeding into his arms and neck, reeking of indigo and age.

He is gigantic. He is mostly hair, horn and muscle, and you hear a sequence of knees dropping to the ground as the Cardinals prostrate themselves -- and Parlet too, dragged down by the Exarch. You are left standing with Gamzee and a dripping arm, which slips slowly from his nerveless fingers. Fear grabs you so completely you can no longer speak.

“You dull-nugged motherfuckers,” says the troll. “YOU _BLIND,_ TONGUE-CUT, MUTE-VOICED MALEFACTORS. You call yourselves my brethren, when you cannot understand ONE -- SINGLE -- **_ORDER?”_**

You cannot move. Even his Tyranny has stilled on the dais.

“These grubs have sniffed out conspiracy, treason and sin before any of you were aware it was live and present among us,” says the Grand Highblood. “They have shown a talent for weeding out plot. THEY ARE TO BE LAUDED, DO I MAKE MYSELF **MOTHERFUCKING CLEAR?”**

  


  


“My Lord,” says one of the Cardinals, not daring to look up, “one just killed -- ”

“ **GOOD,** ” says the troll. “I never liked that fucker.”

The fear is not precisely beginning to dissipate, but it is slowly letting you be aware of your body: your salivary glands have all dried up, and your fingers shake minutely. This indigoblood carries his chucklevoodoo fear around like a miasma without even trying, seeping out every pore of his bent body. One of the other Cardinals dares: “My Lord, the ship -- ”

“Debrief them,” says the Grand Highblood indifferently. “We wait for the Empress’ word. No point in culling them, because THE ROT SET IN SWEEPS AGO, brother. THE ROT, my piss-blooded, woe-brained flock -- THE ROT IS _AMONG_ US.”

You could hear a pin drop, in the fearful silence. The only real noise is the Highblood’s breath, which comes out in low, grinding rasps. It is an act of more courage than you could have managed yourself when the Brigadier-General lifts her head, and she says: “My Lord, these trainees -- ”

“MINE NOW,” he says. “They are worthy. They have done correctly. WITHOUT EVEN BEING AWARE OF IT THEY HAVE SERVED ME IN EVERY MOTHER FUCKING WAY, IN EVERY _MOTHER FUCKING WAY_ HAVE I BEEN SERVED AND OBEYED. They have impressed me better than I thought possible.”

You don’t breathe. Neither, you note, does Gamzee, standing next to you and struck dumb for the first time since you can even remember. You do not dare look at the rest of the room, at the Cardinals, at your teachers, or at each other.

“From now on,” says the Grand Highblood, “THEIR PERSONAL TRAINING WILL BE LEFT TO ME. Take motherfucking note, sweet children. My Makara. Little Pyrope. TAKE MOTHER FUCKING NOTE, BECAUSE WE HAVE MOTHER FUCKING _WORK TO DO_ TOGETHER.”

  


  


Life officially makes no sense.

  
  


  


**END OF ACT ONE**  


 

  



	5. ACT TWO, CHAPTER ONE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With thanks to **paraTactician** and **Lindensphinx** , who have participated in too many complaints about juggalo linguistics, and to **roachpatrol** for tireless reading merit.

**ACT TWO:**

_Sins Of The Fathers_

**CHAPTER ONE**

* * *

  


“COME CLOSER,” he’d told you, “little Makara.”

Before the old man, you never beheld a motherfucker so ready to die. His body putrefies. He ploughs nose first into the rot void. Those arms and legs, they’re dead already: his legs and arms are junk. Even his vocals are bone dust, flat rasp between his cracked flap and his whistling stem. 

But what propels him round is not his meat. Shit burns in his chestcage; burns like a swallowed star. Once you would have prayed to die before you up and shrivelled, but when you eyeball him -- with his vein needles, hand shunts, sunk oculars -- when you

_really_

GET YOUR LOOK ON,

you come apart some, you just come the fuck _apart._ In the lift of his arm you see the lift of your arm. The tilt of his nug is the tilt of your nug. With each shoddy totter you see steps you’d taken and steps you’d take, and in all this is the terrible beauty of true familiarity. What can you do, if not step the motherfuck forward?

So you say, “Yeah,” like it’s even a thing to up and get your coherency on with. Like you can manage before him, you star-eyed, pan-fried fuckin’ wiggler.

“You kids even eight sweeps?”

“Over, some,” you say, and he just makes trill through stained teeth and says, “GOD _DAMN,_ YOU NEW-HATCHED GRUB. Closer still.”

Up close he is a withered mass of motherfucking muscle. He is sinew. Ten of you would weigh one of him, if you’re talking volume. The room is dim here. There are shadows staining his planes. You both got left alone at the transport shuttle in a room all pimped as fuck, Cardinals prepping each place like it was holy through his ass proximity. They went gently kissing his artery tubes. They laid raucous hangings. They lit fine incense. Up went tapestries of famous bads subjugglated for crimes against the Church. 

(Your favourite is the one with the heretic all clutching the arrow in her gut, underneath in Old Alternian: A SHOT AT LOVE FOR TROLL TILA TEQUILA. _Ha ha._ Classic.)

Terezi split to go get paperwork. What you have motherfucking interest for -- and you have plenty on your pan at present -- does not include that bureaucracy stain, that bowel movement, that fetid breath known as the fucking _Executor._ She can stick it up her ducts. Placement with the Church got negotiated over your nugbones as you and she got mutual gawk on, forgetting the low-down between you. Then you both got released in unseemly haste to Messiah custody and all implicated that you were never to return. 

That suits you just fine. You thanked all rowdy mercies. They packed you back to your quarters before you could even get your parse on, to fill up your sylladex. To ready your shit. In the interests of righteous veracity, in the name of keeping it real, you would’ve gladly walked out with fuck all. 

Because: screw _Executor._ Screw Parlet. Screw the Exarch. Not one night passed where they ever got a grain of liking for you, not one miserable night. You’d thought savagely that your sanctioned arm-attachment was snotting fit to bust over leaving, being the apple of their ocular, but reality is that seas will rise before she cries. You got ringside seats for that apocalypse.

The Grand Highblood’s digits make like to touch you, and you flinch. They rasp your chin. They smear your paint. One thumb travels up your cheek like he is up and exploring your skin, the cartography of your motherfucking face. Wouldn’t dare check them out otherwise but there are his eyes, just pocked there in his motherfucking skull, and his eyes are the indigo that stares you down in the goddamned mirror.

“Gamzee,” he says, like one transfixed. “LITTLE GAMZEE MAKARA.”

Apparently the old man ain’t noticing you’re like six feet and without intention to stop.

“There a reason you’re gettin up in my business,” you say, fear foolish, “my Lord?”

His damn laugh. Sounds like sand trickling through broke glass. “You are one incorrigible fucking child,” he says, and his horror miasma nearly makes you piss your britches. “GOOD. YOU AIN’T ONE OF THE TERROR BITCHES, YOU NEED NOT GROVEL. It’d be lies on your twitcher. I GOT _DUE NICETIES_ COMING FOR YOU, BOY, for now you just stick with ‘sir’.”

“Sir -- ”

“Your business is my business,” he says. “THIS IS NO SMALL MATTER OF TRANSFERRAL, MAKARA. No placement. AS FAR AS YOU MAY BE MOTHER FUCKING CONCERNED I MOTHER FUCKING _OWN_ YOU.”

Your flap chatters, “Sir, I ain’t chattel.”

The Grand Highblood leans forward. Veins strain. Tubes taut. He looks like skin draped over a nasty crowbar. “I own you both,” he husks. “Ain’t a matter of goods and chattel. Neither is it of law. GOODS AND CHATTEL AND LAW YOU ARE NOT, YOU FECKLESS FUCK, YOU ARE ANOTHER MATTER _ENTIRELY._ Do you not even know?”

For a moment you did wonder if you’d bladder breach. Shit like that is difficult to motherfucking explicate. 

“Another matter,” he says.

There he is, still up in your grill. The fear he gives is not your fear. Not puffs of panic; puke fear. Adrenaline fear. You know you can up and make a troll fear to die, but he makes you motherfucking fear living. You might’ve fallen to your caps and pledged fealty then and there, offered your stem and let him fucking fall on it, that’s what he does to you. 

“Tell me, Makara,” he demands, “what they dictate the law serves. DISPLAY YOUR LEARNINGS. They say you got some good marks.”

Yeah, you got some _good marks._ You ain’t your partner’s memory bitch for no reason. “They say it serves the motherfucking Empire, sir.”

“WELL, THAT’S A LOAD OF BULL _SHIT,_ ” says the Grand Highblood. It fills the room with echo. “The Empire is full of malcontents and misbelief. The Empire is full of buttfuck. Who does it really serve, Makara? WHO IS THE EMPIRE?”

“Her Imperious Condescension -- ”

“Quicker. SPECIFY.”

What the fuck? “The Empress, motherfuck -- _mother,_ the Mother’s Blood -- ”

_“SPECIFY.”_

“Blood,” says the doorway.

There is Terezi with her arms full of flimsy and her flap full of sass. Tiny Terezi, your sanctioned symbiont. Arm attachment. Pan parasite. Your wicked sister, who looks like a stick got issued a uniform, a hotbrained toothsome mess. No laughter lives in her now. She is without levity. Your legislacerator is sweet with tearlessness, having pledged to never set eyes on your ass again just two hours ago. Well, here’s your fucking ass and here you fucking are, and isn’t that a fucking joke?

“Blood, my Lord,” she repeats smartly. “The law of hemospectrum is the spine of our legal system. Therefore: blood, and if blood, then therefore _order._ The two are synonymous! Am I right?” 

What a front. Girl’s ready to piss herself as you were. Resentment fills you with wicked sickness and sour bile. She don’t look at you none when the Grand Highblood crooks his finger waywards, doesn’t look at you and you don’t look at her. “Clever girl,” he says. “CLEVER YOUNG THING. Matter of blood like she says, Makara, BLOOD TRUMPS MOTHER FUCKING ALL. Did they release you both safely to my care?”

She fires salute. “Yes, sir,” she says, and you don’t see evidence of tears. Enthusiasm ain’t making its hive in her heart -- you know her, you taste her disappointments -- but open despair ain’t either. She cribs up. She makes like a rock. “They signed off on the transferral and our ratings. We are now apparently and completely in your hands.” 

“GOOD,” he says, missing or ignoring her glumness, “eases my heart. Pyrope, the law serves blood, what does the Church serve?”

She startles, and begins: “The Minstrel Messiahs -- ” but you say, “Salvation.”

His smile shows old teeth, receding gums. One point for her but one point for you. 

“BOY KNOWS THE PURPOSE OF THE CHURCH,” he says. “Girl knows the purpose of the law. THERE’S A LESSON FOR YOU, LITTLE PYROPE. Minstrels serve themselves. THEY NEED NO SERVICE FROM YOU NOR I NOR THE PRIESTS WHO PREACH THEIR MYRIAD ROWDY PROMISES. But there’s a lesson for you, subjugglator, the lesson of blood.”

Terecita’s mouth don’t have to move for you to know its smirk. Her eyes don’t have to see for her to sniff you giving her the finger behind your back.

“I got both of you for the purpose of education,” the Highblood says, and he eases back in his chair. The intravenal packets bubble at his side. “You’re wasted on enforcing insubordination laws between some mewling, puking privates. Your schoolfeeding begins here. I PROMISE YOU FOR EACH ACT OF KNOWLEDGE -- for each pan revelation you display -- YOU GET ONE ANSWER TO ONE QUESTION.”

Silence stands stupid. You’re struck dumb. “Ask away,” he says pleasantly.

 _Now_ you two look at each other. She doesn’t look with her face. She looks with the scrunch of her mouth. She acknowledges with her body turning toward you like a weed to light. You fucking _know_ what you’ve got to ask, what revelation you desire, you could ask any Messianic mystery of him and there is only one to want. Your view is rendered narrow as motherfuck by the colour of his eye gel. It is narrow in the light of the way his thumbs look like your thumbs, just wrinkled.

“I want the knowing of your hatch symbol,” you say. “SIR.”

He says, “Now, there’s a question.”

The Highblood is old. The Highblood is like to die. The Highblood snags your arm quicker than you fathom it, raking claw down your wrist as you get your stumble on. Those grodacious hands hold you fast. Next to you, your partner tenses while your blood squirts like the sick revelation your blood ever is, hot and wet.

He takes your clean paw as you drip. When there is a good-sized mess of you he wets his fingers in your blood, nearly black in the darkness, and leaves the sorry wrist abattoir he made to draw on your palm. Your miserable universe is his digits. Your entire existence is the gruesome paint he swirls on your hand, an arch, a swoop, a mother fucking curlicue. In your oxygen sponges the breath stales.

Terecita’s brows arch above her glasses. You straight-up stare.

“Capricorn,” he says. “LOOK FAMILIAR, KID?”

When he sees your stupefaction he throws back his head. He laughs. It will not be the last time you hear that dusty fucker of a sound. He lolls laughing in the med chair hooked up to untidy intravenals, your partner bearing witless witness, and you forget what to say. It has been such a long motherfucking time since you’d had thought in your pan and no words to say it with.

“Holy shit,” breathes your wicked sister, which helps.

“But that motherfucking means -- ”

“I know what it means,” he says. “I KNOW YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS.”

Dull pain dogs your arm. Ancestor. He is your lineage-ridden duty-bidden mother fucking _forebear._ You flip some serious mental shit. Inside your pan you conjure up a mess of tables, flip each one, then butcher the tables till their juices run clear. There is righteous furnipocalypse happening in your nugbone. 

Terezi says, “Sir! But why do you not wear your _sign?”_

“One question,” he says, and he drops your hand all careless. Your blood paints his prints like paper, there in the dark. “ONE QUESTION, ONE ANSWER. Going to have to prove your worth yet again for another shot at the elusive mysteries, my children. You concentrate on this one. YOU MOTHER FUCKING CONCENTRATE ON WHAT YOU’RE DESCENDED FROM, MY CHILD, AND WHO YOU WERE ALWAYS DESTINED TO BE.”

The world spins. Stars collide, suns snuff, seas rise. Your face goes and betrays you, and he gets softer for it.

“Welcome home,” says the Grand Highblood, “my prodigal motherfucker.”

  


  


Your name is **GAMZEE MAKARA** , and you are **HEIR TO SOMETHING MIRACULOUS.**  


 

* * *

  


First week the old man doesn’t call for you, and first week, you and your tumourette quit talking.

Flagship of the Church is _Echo Side._ It holds the Grand Highblood, the Capricious Collective of Cardinals, a bunch of laypriests nobody gives two honks about and you. _Echo Side_ is the spirit hive of all Messiahdom, seat of wicked stardusts and the First Laughsassin himself, and it is straight-up motherfucking _legit._

Everything seemed coming up Faygo at the start. The first fucking hour you come aboard the Highblood gathers his faithful in the inner sanctum. The walls are shadows. The floor is glass black. Raised on a dais is his throne, which looks like someone chowed down nails and shit them out chair shape, but all the same it’s got a fucking _something._ It’s got vibes. That throne’s a sage’s throne, a prophet’s throne, the seat of a miracle-maker. 

Above you the ceiling’s set with bumpy rivets in expanding circles, and it takes you a sec to get your realise on that it is made of troll fingerbones. Everything here struts in fucking beauty like the night.

When everyone’s on their knees and making purple-black waves of themselves, the Highblood gestures for you and your partner. You both stand before his raggedy throne with his hands on your shoulders. _These are my apprentices,_ he says, _brother Makara and sister Pyrope. THESE ARE MY CHILDREN COME TO LEARN._

That sticks in your craw some on account of who the fuck is _sister Pyrope,_ her hue’s rude chlorine, but he grips you and says _and this is my gift. IN THESE VEINS RUN MY BLOOD DESCENDED. In the spilling of it mine would be spilt. Do you require clarity, my degraded shitbeasts?_

Turns out they need no clarity, none at motherfucking all. _Whoop, whoop_ sussurates and tessellates its echoes in that sacred place, just _whoop, whoop,_ calling you home.

 _Executor_ was a floating schoolhive. Everyone in it was the weak froth of scum and villainy, you didn’t snag religion there. You got juveniles kicking the inflated bladder of Dark Carnival around, acting like it was stone-cold revelation they were up and witnessing, like there was enough God to go round on a ship that straight ranked you by what you recalled from a book. Fuck that noise. Pail the sound.

By comparison _Echo Side_ is crafted by loving digits that know how to make a hive of worship. The corridors are shadow dim, ice cool, and the walls are covered in colour -- when you want to whip it up beautiful you just make art right there, when you want, out of congealed troughs of grub blood there in the hallways. You get the divine inspiration, you kick it. Each space is a circus. The workrooms are tents, bolts of cloth pinned to the ceiling and hung pretty from the walls. It has been some harsh business being among trolls who think a place has got to be a clean metal, a crude box with no harshwhimsy, not one rough chuckle.

You’re not some mucus-holed nobody now. Your mirthful kin don’t know where to put your sorry ass, but they know one thing: it’s in a special motherfucking position. 

So it is a harsh turn when you both stand at the entrance of his chambers and face pissmouthed priests, barring your way. “His Hilariousness is in a state of meditation and will not be disturbed,” they tell you. “When he desires your presence, he will call for you. Until then, make yourselves motherfucking scarce.”

Once these clowns might have given you the wicked pause. No longer. “Maybe you didn’t read the fine print on what got said,” you say, “because as I recall -- correct me if I’m getting my incorrect on -- you’re barring me from my schoolfeeder.”

Violence dwells in their eyes. They would like nothing better than to floss their gums with your spine. “That’s as may motherfucking be,” says one, hulking in the doorway, “but our Lord said he wasn’t to be disturbed, and he didn’t include you in any invitation, _brother Makara.”_

They say it like spit. Next to you, it is your industry infection who says, “Did he leave any instruction?”

“No,” says one laypriest.

“Entirely not,” says the other. 

“No work? No orders? No _nothing?”_

“You’ve got the run of the ship,” said one of the laypriests, “now fuck off.”

This is outright insult. You are so fucking over it. Terezi leans forward on her cane and for a moment you think the girl is going to say something, addressing either you drily or these shitty little laypriests who don’t know what the fuck you’ve been through, but she doesn’t. Her face shutters closed. Her mouth blanks. She says politely, “Thank you very much,” and you trail off behind her, giving their sneer a sneer in kind. She doesn’t say shit to _you._

Well, run of the ship is one thing. _Echo Side_ ticks on church order. Mirthful slaughtergy winds the clocks. You got evening massacre, then morning massacre, and sometimes there’s four-twenty where everyone pauses to take the sneeze solemnities but you abstain because you’re straight fucking edge. Then there’s all-day vigils when the Cardinals demand it, which suck but you are brimful of stone apathy. It’s better than the piss-poor morning massacre on board the _Executor_ when the Exarch just read out whatever horseshit she felt like and no breath of the Dark Carnival ever got aerated through anyone’s sac. Here everything runs on the old man’s whim and church procession, which -- it turns out -- ain’t Terecita’s flavour of Faygo.

You go back the next night, just to see if it changes any. Baby girl won’t say more than five syllables to you, you both sit on your glutes and follow each other like baby quackbeasts, rolling yourself out your cupes each evening to go haunt his doorway. Same shit each day. _No admission,_ say the priests. _He’s meditating._

First week, neither of you make words at each other. Speak ceases. Talk cessates. Silence between you got all the pulp strained from it. Too much went on between you and you don’t have the motherfucking impetus to snarl her way; shit’s discomfiting. Turns out when you preach about never wanting to see the smell of someone again, turns out when you think it’s a grand idea to smear liplock on someone in the shittiest call you ever made, it always gets done too early. Universe hates hubris, don’t you know?

So you’re yoked together with nothing to fucking say, getting all ambiguous as to how done you two are. They give you blocks settled next to a vocation atrium you’re meant to share, up and cute and cosy as shit, not one word to sneeze between the two of you. She don’t yell. She don’t shout. If it was a battle, you’d be fighting; but it ain’t, she just looks at you before she goes to her recuperacoon and says politely, “Good morning, Gamzee,” and you do not have one. _god damn._ **word** to mumble.

You are sick of _good morning, Gamzee_ and _good evening, Gamzee._ It makes your hands want to strangle. It makes you mad inside your pan. With the _no admission_ and _no entry_ all you’ve got is her to roam around with, taking meals and tapping husktops for the want of anything better to do, uneasy with silence.

You didn’t -- it wasn’t what you meant, it’d come out wrong. What’s a kiss? A mouth touching mouth. Doesn’t mean shit. What gets its meaning on is your longhorned brother and her spiderbitch sister sandwiched between you, the trial night, your moirail, each wicked infraction, everything that’s gone the fuck on in your ill-starred partnership. You were done with each other. Yet here you both are like the universe can’t bear you being apart. 

Kicker is, your wicked sister hates it here as thoroughly as you dig it. She sticks out like a gangrenous claw. Single tealblood in a sea of painted face. That’s not her beef. It’s not how they get their sneer on with her, because when the Cardinals hiss _brother Makara_ they just see your sweeps and drip it up with all the motherfucking contempt they can motherfucking muster and you

_fucking_

LOVE IT, their impotency and despair. When at her they utter _sister_ wanting _blister_ and her mouth gets all slide rule, gets hard and tense and coarse as her hanging rope, it is yet not the worst. It’s not that she’s left alone to study her Cruellest Bar alone because she loves that shit like it is water and nourishment, like it is the adequate slop they serve in the foodblock. It is the fact that they stuck her here. Her hands are idle. Her fingers are static. That hundred percent don’t sleep easy in her recuperacoon. 

“He’s meditating,” says the subjugglator guard.

Fifth night. Shedding patience. By now your cancer companion is bored, antsy and frustrated, and you have beheld her bored, antsy and frustrated more than anyone else ever beheld this happenstance. You are fucking _bored_ being in her boredom, you’re sober and you’re bored and you’re raw.

“What are the chances,” Terezi inquires, all clenched manners, “of us being able to leave a message? A note. A missive. Anything. We are really very flexible.”

They rotate the priests each night. On the measurement of those that love you and those that don’t, these brothers in particular dearly want to strangle you with your own bowels. Articulation is not strong in these motherfuckers. They make grunt. There is hard fray in your partner’s voice when she says, “Excuse me!”

Their damage is revealed when you say, “Brothers,” and only then do they un-slump. Your partner twangs. Her fingers curl. _Executor_ never really showed her the depth of how one blood treats another blood. When you say “SPEAK _UP,_ MOTHERFUCKERS,” they are adults grown but still deflate some, they are cowardly assholes with pus in their pan and jelly in their knees. 

“I was talking about chances,” says your sister. 

“I’d say,” says one of the priests, “that chances would be motherfucking _low,_ you insult-hued bitch.”

The corridor waxes quiet. Her smile gets bigger and whiter. You focus. Focus is your ball game. “Excuse me, brother,” she says, “I don’t think I heard you correctly. Did anyone else hear this correctly? I am sorry, I had only thought I was blind! Deafness comes early to my delicate frame.”

The other priest is saying warningly, “Motherfucker, these aren’t just kid cattle, you’re going to land us in trouble,” but the first continues: “You heard it in your aurals, lowblood. You think you _deserve_ to be in this place? You think the Church smiles kindly on your -- your teal bucket slurry? You’re on the fucking _Echo Side_ , oxide-blood, no fucking respect, ain’t room here for the blueshit faithless -- ”

You yank back fist and crunch it up right into his facepaint a couple times. Getting taller, so it’s easier. Cartilage squirts. Sockets splinter. Cheeks pop. He was intent with sincerity; was just about ready to cry with it, but what hasn’t been informed to his brainstem is that his shit is mannerless shit. It ain’t his duty to tell your girl her blood is chlorine. It is _your_ god-given, divine-right duty. You punch him again.

Subjugglator goes down and you let yourself bathe in the hot satisfaction, lasting just a few starry seconds before you kick him again in the side. Used to be you never wanted to ruin shit. Turns out just about everyone’s tantalizingly ruinsome. 

“There, left a memo,” you say. “Your Lord wants to know we were here, this is ample proof. This proof is _motherfucking irrefutable._ Got it?”

The second priest says shit that sounds enough like _yes_ for you to not care any more. Second subjugglator’s making indigo mess on the ground and your hand, and you crouch to wipe your knuckles clean on his shirtfront. “Tell him about us waiting,” you say, and then you turn to follow the legislacerator down the corridor.

Does that make her talk to you? Does it hell. Her sniffer don’t twitch in your direction. Her chords don’t vibrate a word. You keep waiting for her to say shit, wait for her to explicate how you shouldn’t have cracked the man’s socket or gotten your aggression on or even indicate a fucking apocalypse by appreciating -- your pulse is quick and your pusher remembers violence -- but she stops in front of her door. You two eyeball each other. Nothing comes out your flap. Nothing comes out hers. You keep forgetting how miserably small she is, how ill-built, how skinny ridiculous. Terezi says “Good morning, Gamzee,” and that is all

she

OFFERS.

Back in your respiteblock you give the wall a good kick. You feel cool metal against your hot frontpan. This has to be done for excruciating lengths of time for you to be able to calm yourself, and you still wonder exactly what is the use of calm when your brain cries out how much it hates this grubbish peace. You wish your old man would call for you. He’s your old man, is he not? You wish she’d say shit about it. You wish she’d shut up forever and you’re annoyed that she might.

That’s your malcontent. Next night you kick back in the vocation block rereading what your best beloved said to you over and over, and that’s empty too but it does its trick --

CG: AND BEFORE YOU START BUYING A FRESH TICKET TO DESTINATION: CRAZY EMOTIONAL MELODRAMA, YES, WE’RE TOGETHER. NO ARGUMENT. NO IFS, ANDS OR BUTS. I AM YOUR MOIRAIL AND NO MATTER HOW FAR AWAY I AM YOU WILL SIT DOWN, SHUT UP, AND STOP BEING SUCH A GOD DAMN AGGRO MESS.  
TC: holy bitchtits.  
CG: WE JUST HAVE TO BE A SECRET FOR NOW. I MEAN, FOR FUCK’S SAKE, WE SHOULDN’T EVEN BE TOGETHER, MY LIFE HAS BECOME A ROMANTIC COMEDY WITHOUT THE LAUGH FACTOR OR THE SENSE.  
CG: THERE’S STUFF YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT.  
TC: you know your secrets are my secrets.  
TC: you know my secrets are your secrets.  
TC: whither you go i go, best friend.  
TC: where you dwell i’ll dwell.  
TC: WHERE YOU DIE, LET ME  
TC: mother  
TC: FUCKIN  
TC: die.  
TC: :o(  
CG: I LOVE YOU TOO.  
CG: EVEN IF YOUR NEW QUIRK IS FUCKING HORRIFYING.  
CG: ◊  
TC: ◊

Nothing to do but read logs, sit on the diurnal rest platform and watch fuzz on the audiovisual slug. 

It is a fucking week gone before you hear shit. Time gets sticky. In the vocation atrium you sat on the couch and she sat at the desk. Every so often she would make a scratchy slurp noise with her tongue on the page, and you desire to pick up furniture and smash it her way to see if she’d react. You imagine knives at her head. You think of slivers up her claws. You imagine a whole lot of impotent shit, renowned for its ugly, and you want to shake her shoulders and bawl _mother FUCKING yap at me, girl, WHAT WILL IT TAKE FOR YOU TO SPEAK?_

It always boils down to Terezi. You don’t know why. She ain’t even atheist on account of that’d at least have interest, that’d show spark, she just don’t give a fuck. Her pan prays to justice. God is a city she knows the name of but never wants to visit, which renders her the same dull-ass fuck she always was. But when dull-ass fucks are written down in the most pimpin’ list of sideshow acts, hers is writ large next to yours. 

Terezi Pyrope. Hung about your neck. Her silence destroys. If she keeps it up you’ll make sure destruction is a mutual.

Suddenly the doormouse squeaks, and you freeze. Her shoulders knit. Your digits tense. She makes it second place to the atrium door, and the messenger bitch only gets out “Our Lord requests,” before you and she are slamming past him. You ricochet down the hallways without even a second glance.

“The bottom level!” the messenger calls after you, waxing hapless. “The first door on the left!”

At the bottom of _Echo Side_ there is a big, empty room in the first lefthand door. The floor is sterile steel. The walls are hung in black. The Grand Highblood waits for you in the center, sitting in a chair, staring out a vast window at space. The room is still too pedestrian to hold him: his pale paint. His wizened face. His knobbles, his dark miasma, the way he fills a room with just his motherfucking shadow. You’re pumped. You could sing.

Terecita ventures, “Sir?”

“Punctual,” he creaks, still facing the window. You both make approach until you’re one on either side of him, bathed in the light from space. He dwarfs you. He is titanic. “THAT’S WHAT I LIKE TO MOTHERFUCKING INVOKE IN YOU, CHILDREN. How are you settling in your new shiphive?”

You want to say, _it’s a good ship,_ because you fucking love the _Echo Side_ without reservation. If everyone on it but you three expired you’d shed no tears, but the ship itself is a worthy temple. Wicked chuckles dwell in its corners. It’s got religion. But he asked you about settlement, not the ship, and so you say: “I’m motherfucking bored.”

Your partner surprises by adding calmly, “I am double motherfucking bored, sir. I want to work. Everything is very comfortable and I appreciate the fact that we have a Faygo fountain on the third floor, but it is boring to the extreme.”

The Grand Highblood looks down at your partner, then he looks down at you. His expression chills. His face freezes. Then he tilts his nug back and laughs, rattles his fingers on the arm of his sit-pillar. “I was wondering when you’d crack,” he says. “I WAS WONDERING WHEN YOUR LITTLE PATIENCES WOULD WANE.”

Terezi says, “So it _was_ a test.”

“ONLY COINCIDENTALLY.” His claws are stained orange at the beds, brown at the tips, drowned gnawbeast colour. The First Laughsassin taps them on the chair and he says, “I did not expect seven nights out of you. My expectations were paltry, low-ass observations. I AM MOST ESPECIALLY SURPRISED AT YOU, MAKARA, BECAUSE IT WAS MY ASSUMPTION YOU DIDN’T HAVE THE PATIENCE GIFTED A MOTHERFUCKING _FLEA.”_

Your partner says, “This is a true assumption, but I don’t understand how you would have gotten the data, sir.”

He smiles. For old teeth, they are sharper than pain. “Ain’t like _I_ had any.” 

You want to ask him what else he doesn’t have. You want to ask him about anger. Are you meant to love the tear of muscle and the splinter of marrowbone, or is it a trick? Did he take to the bed mucilage? In the sterile starlight you see each bone in his faceframe. None of this shit you question out loud; for the first, you’re not alone, and for the second you’re not a pathetic nugfuck. What could you motherfucking say, idiot? _Let’s talk about our lusii._ Fuck you. Perforate your bone bulge with your own presumption.

“Got a moirail, boy?” he asks.

It kills you, denying Karkat. It destroys. You are culpable. You say, “Naw,” and he accepts it, doesn’t look at you and Pyrope and get all significant like you two should go pile. Everyone does that. It bores you, having to correct that filthy presumption. You glance at her: not a wince evinced. “No moirail, sir.”

“Good,” he says, surprising you. “What’s pacification, child? WHAT NEED HAS A FOLLOWER OF RESTRAINT WHEN THE WICKED WILL RUNS THROUGH YOU? Ain’t a believer in it.” This is incorrect, but whatever. “Guess your patience well was from your own digging.”

He heaves a whistling sigh as he stares out at space. Space is black; stars are white. You miss the clouded blueness of it from the beach, of the stars yellow in Alternia’s atmosphere. Sometimes you get moments of weak sentiment. Now he addresses Terezi: “You got a moirail, girl?” 

She doesn’t flinch an inch. “No,” she says, and you remember lying prone-ass on your floor as she stroked your cheekbones. Remember the hard tremble of her flap. Remember how your pusher sang to you, _Karkat, Karkat, Karkat,_ which is the hymn of your existence, but you remember her alone and shaking and lamentable. The girl is walking calamity. “No, sir, I don’t.”

“Do you either possess _anything?”_ You don’t respond but your hard silence isn’t out of shame, it’s out of the most acrimonious mad. A matter of possession? You possess one boy stuck piteous distance away, and one boy stolen from death ignominies to worse ignominies by Vriska motherfucking Serket, or at least you’d possess the latter if you worked out the matter of him waiting. But the Highblood says, “Good. NO OUTSIDE DISTRACTIONS. Should you complete your training you will be granted laughable indulgences for slurry collection, YOU GOT BIGGER BUGS ON YOUR PLATES THAN TO ATTEND ROMANCE.”

Now you startle. “Sir,” says Terecita cautiously, “why would you give Church indulgences to two trainees? I mean, we are so fresh off-planet we still have dirt in our teeth. What will we be doing?”

A slow smile ribs his mouth. “You want to know, kids?”

“Motherfucking _yes,_ ” you say.

“Well, you don’t get to,” says the old man. “HERE’S THE INAUGURAL TASK, MY CHILDREN. Little brother Makara. Little sister Pyrope. You want to know your purposes here? WELL, YOU GET TO THE SCHOOLFEEDING WHEN YOU PROVE YOUR FUCKING _WORTH,_ WIGGLERS, YOU GET KNOWLEDGESTUFFED WHEN YOU CLAW -- IT -- FROM -- MY -- **BODY**.”

It echoes round the room. It seeps into deep pools of shadow. His voice locks the knees; it makes load run from the bowel. 

“You want us to enact some physical violence, sir?” says your partner, all doubting. “On _you?”_

“Blood drawn,” he says. “My sickest miracle. My midnight colour.” When the Grand Highblood unfolds himself from his chair he is crabbed, he is gigantic, he is an assortment of old limbs attached to a withered trunk. His follicles are coal colour and light from age, greying and waned. He’s chop shop. He’s bone yard. Starlight paints him strange colours and highlights uncouth angles, and you wouldn’t fucking cock a punch at him, you’d punch him soon as -- you just wouldn’t, that’s all. Fuck’s wrong with you. What the fuck is not wrong with you. 

“I don’t want to,” you say. 

You see your wicked sister round her mouth to say _Gamzee,_ but slaps her flap shut again. You ricochet, “I don’t fucking want to.”

“Your reason?” He is quiet. He is gentle. This shit is absurd.

“Dunno.” You can’t think of anything better, no witticisms, no Pyrope rhetoric.

“DRAW,” says the Grand Highblood.

Both you and your legislacerator look at each other. With a hard face, she is withdrawing her sword. From your abstratus you draw her stick sword too, her paltry twig of a blade, pusher heavy. Your weapons are slick. Your weapons are bright. Both of you round on him standing in front of that chair, Terecita stiff and her shoulders stern, and you figure that one shallow cut’ll do it, cut to the upper arm. There is so much of him to cut. And he just motherfucking stands there.

You sidecheck her till she gets her stumble on, and swears beneath her breath. Fuck her. She made you do duty once, this is a duty most sacred she won’t have to nag at you twice for. Gotta get it done. When you advance the old man has his hands raised up palmfronts first, shrivel finger, wrinkle thumb, and you wonder what the hell his game is --

You slash. The old man catches you. He twists your wrist. Bones grind. Sword drops, and Terezi whips her sword at him from the side, so he picks up the chair and he hits her with it. The chair goes smash into your facemask on the same swing. You fall back, clubs out, spittling blood, and the Grand Highblood tosses up the chair and slaps your re-surfacing partner. Hit resounds like a skin bell. You take the moment to charge the fuck in, ready for his caps, to knock him off his pegs, but by then he’s caught the chair and you get a faceful of its metal legs. 

You feel bright pain. You feel wet pain. One fang pops its way out your gums as you retch. You’re a tool. 

Blood gums up your eyes, hot and runny, but there’s Terecita again bobbing back up like a rubber dummy. She keeps her distance, sword up, makes a feint. His fist slams into her face before she can aggress. It blitzes the nasals. There’s a nasty crunch, and she screams. 

All this takes, what, thirty seconds. The Grand Highblood ain’t shifted an inch. He breaks no sweat. He looks as dried-up as he ever did, but he moved like a fucking brainstorm.

“You’ll get another shot when I give the call,” says the old man. “TRY AGAIN THEN, FOOLS. I only teach those who prove themselves, and you proved absolute _SHIT._ Little Makara. My Makara. A WORD IN YOUR MOTHER FUCKING AURAL SHELL, CHILD.”

You are wobbling on your feet. He breaks the chair across your chest and you go down.

“Don’t you ever,” he says easily, “EVER -- NEVER EVER EVER -- eschew the bloodspill in my presence again. DO NOT EVEN _THINK_ IT, YOU SOFT, WEAKPANNED SHITSCOURGE, OR I WILL _DRAIN MY BLOOD_ OUT YOUR MISERABLE HIDE.”

And then he turns away and he totters out the room, crabbed and calm, leaving you on your back and your partner in a gurgling huddle. Like it was nothing. Like you were nothing. 

You drag yourself over to the dripping mess your pocket pain is making. Her face is tusks of blood. Teal in her hair. Teal on the floor. She is bleeding like there is a fucking paint sale on and she is the fountainous supply, eyes squinched closed as her cage heaves.

Terezi says, “I can’t _see!”_

  


  


Because of her swollen sniffer it comes out _cap’t see._ She is uproarious mess. You go, “Shit,” and, “Goddamn,” and you get her glasses, bent on the sticky ground. You say, “Here’s your motherfuckin’ specs -- ”

“Oh my _God,”_ she cries out, tinging hysterical. “Thank you! That will obviously help!”

“Fuck you -- ”

“My nose,” she says, “is _broken, dipshit.”_

Your baby girl snivels and bleeds and spits gobs on the floor. She tucks into herself. She clutches her arms. “That was a disgusting failure,” she says, and it comes out all choked and _dibstustib_ , mangled. “We can’t carry on like this, Gamzee. You are going to have to talk to me, sooner or later -- ”

“Hey now. Hey. _You_ weren’t fucking talking to me.”

“Well, you weren’t fucking talking to _me,”_ she says. “It is a two-way corridor, Mr. Makara. I can’t stand this! Why did we ever come to this awful clown ship, with all the horrible priests who think anything below indigo is a chum bucket, and Faygo with _every_ meal even _breakfast,_ and your dreadful, demented ancestor -- ”

“Shut it.” You’re breathing heavy. “Silence. Old man made perfect sense, sister. The old man was clear as MOTHERFUCKING DAY. It was us who took him lightly, don’t you know? Never said a word of trickery, told us not one lie.”

“I couldn’t smell any indications. Don’t you get that? Don’t you think that’s significant? Not until he laid the first hit! We are out of our _depth,_ I can’t even read him.”

Felt like forever, since you talked. She’s the same babbling brook she always was, same one-track, shock-tactics brainiac, and it feels familiar. It is a relief. You are fucking relieved. Wouldn’t be living life if Terezi Pyrope wasn’t irritating you. Without her, shit gets silent. “Ain’t like you,” you say, “to give up before you even _BEGUN A THING.”_

“Oh, my God, you horrid hypocritical douche.”

She mops uselessly at her bloody face, cringing when she touches nosehole. Your own blood’s running free. It trickles down your shirt. It itches at your hair. Your horns ache. “What does he even want to do with us?” she says. “What are we even here for?”

“No chance of explicating that motherfucking mystery,” you say, “unless we draw his blood.”

Her laughter is mirthless. It sloshes round her tubes. “He is quicker, bigger and stronger than both of us,” she says. “I’ve never seen someone take you down so fast, ever. Or me! I’ve never been caught out like that, and he -- he broke my _nose,_ who even breaks my fucking _nose_ \-- ”

“Work the wicked advantage, baby girl,” you say. “There’s two of us. ONE OF HIM.”

Terezi sniffs a little, and hisses in pain. “Why could _I_ never get you this enthusiastic about anything, Mr. Huckleberry?”

“Your methodology is turd. You move, sis, or do I got to up and CARRY YOU?”

You never seen her so wobblesome. She drags herself up to stand, then falls back over again with a loud crack on the floor. Pathetic. “God _damn,”_ you say, “we have a _MOTHER FUCKING BLIND GIRL HERE,”_ and you’re forced to crouch down with your aches and heft her over your shoulder. 

She snarls and sticks her claws in the meat of you, knee knives dug in your ribs, but shit’s fine. Shit’s amenable. Shit’s familiar. You’re slopping on the deck as you go, and she leaves dribbles of bloody mucus behind you. This is peace treaty. The pain clarifies your brain storms, soothes woe.

“If you have a game plan in mind,” she says wetly, from the location of your back, “I would prefer you tell me sooner rather than later.”

“Do I up and look like a motherfucking plan generator?”

“No,” she says, “and on account of your plans nearly got us a church interrogation the last time, deviating from _my_ plan, this is simply me asking you not to go off half-cocked. If you please!”

There are a couple priests talking quietly in the corridor. They look at you. They look at Terezi. They look at the blood. They turn away, and peace be unto them because you would have prised out their motherfucking teeth otherwise. When you’ve passed you say, “Seems to me you’re of the opinion your plan fucking _worked,_ which is all kinds of erroneous -- ”

“My plan,” she says into your spine cord, “was not a plan. My plan was a _reaction._ You never understood that, you never understood that I was trying to minimise misery in a situation where there was no real winning outcome I could see -- _ow.”_

This is all said through a thick fug of blood and her head bonking on your back. She says _“Ow,”_ again, throatily, and: “Don’t want to talk about it right now. I am bleeding. You are bleeding. Have you noticed we are bleeding?”

No medicallous wing aboard the _Echo Side_. The old man won’t have one. Some of the cardinals have trained in medicals so that they can serve the Grand Highblood’s needs, and he gets a check-up at the flagships, but other than that everyone goes by the adage of _what won’t cull you only makes you stronger._ You’re leaving behind splotches of purple and splotches of teal, trod into the flooring. When you get to your rooms you set her down on the couch, and she draws herself up all imperious and says, “Set my nose.”

Do you look like someone who sets nose squashes? Do you fuck. But you get her a towel and she blows bloody wads of liquid into it, whining and whimpering as you take the end and dab your own spurters. Your face is a blood mass. Your hair is clot burrs. You spit out another loose tooth on the towel, and she makes more lonesome _honk_ into it. 

“Three fingers each side,” she demands. “Go from the top of my nose, then drag down until it looks straight. And please try to not hemorrhage in the process, if you were thinking of hemorrhaging.”

You do as she says -- three fingers each side, at the apex of the nose -- and her fingers curl in pain as you slowly mould them down. Her toes curl in her shoes: you can tell by the shape of the knees. She lets out hard breath. You are aware of the fact that she let you control her pain like this, out of shitty desperation or some strange trust, and that you like it. You have to do a second pass because her nosebone’s out of joint, and by then you don’t care about your blood gummage.

Whatever; it ain’t unwholesome, pleasure in her pain. She’s caused you enough. It’s payback, not perversion.

“I’ll need things for the swelling,” Terezi says, and just like a little barkbeast you go over to the thermal hull and get her a couple cold ones. She holds the can of Faygo to her face all up and ginger with it, looks for a couple moments like she’ll chunder, then settles back. She says, “Come here,” and like a barkbeast again you so do.

Her fingers brush over your forehead. They prod the edges of the gush-gash at your eyebrow. They find splinters and wiggle them like teeth. “If that fight was a meeting,” she says, “I would say you got thoroughly chaired.”

“I want to know the universe that finds you funny,” you say, “and I want to motherfucking BURN IT DOWN for lies.”

Terezi totters off to the ablution block. She makes you sit and fusses with your face, fumbling some, sticking a painful wad of medipillar glue in a cut so that it seals. You hiss. If your pain gives her pleasure, she don’t advertise. Both of you end up sitting on either ends of the communal cushion-sit, cold Faygo held to swollen facefronts, silence kind of soft.

“We got our asses kicked,” she says eventually.

“He wiped the floor with us,” you say. “Alternated it clean and dirty.”

“We are outclassed. What I want to know is why -- why make us _beat_ him, for information? Why do we have to win our apprenticeship this way? Is it some kind of trick?”

The glue at your frontpan’s warm, and the Faygo’s cold, and your hurts burn all the way down. You take relief in your own pain. You are relieved to feel. “You think,” you say, “you really mother fucking _think,_ that tests are just sit-down shut-up affairs? You think he’s not examining us?”

“For _what?”_

Can’t answer that.

“I don’t belong here,” she says eventually. “A legislacerator might serve the Church, but a legislacerator can’t _be_ the Church. For one thing, I don’t give two hoots about the Church or about the ecstasies or about the promised party. I cannot feign hootage much longer. I can understand why he’d train you, but why me?”

“You’ll up and get used to it. I fucking had to, didn’t I?”

“This is different,” says Terecita, and she licks her flap fretfully. “I appreciate the colours. The decor is very nice. But I want a purpose.”

“He’s got a purpose for us, you are never motherfucking satisfied -- ”

“I can be plenty motherfucking satisfied! But I want to _work,_ Mr. Makara, real work.”

She means a courtblock. She means a lawsuit. It ain’t work to your tapeworm here unless there’s flimsy and statutes. Miracles do not move her. You don’t give a fuck; one thing you’re qualified for, it’s lonesomeness, and in any case you’re not alone. Out there somewhere is your nub-horned best beloved and that old moirail saying, not alone, never alone, space could separate you and you’d throttle the blasphemer who called you alone.

“So transfer out,” you say, all diffident. “But in my opinion, he won’t listen to the FIRST SHIT YOUR FLAP SHUNTS until we draw his blood. And in my opinion, you’re dying of the fucking curiosity to know what he’s got planned.”

Terezi gives her middle finger to the space off the side of your nug.

“Okay,” she says. “You are right! I do. And you’re correct. He won’t. As much as I hate admitting you’re right, you are unequivocably right in this instance, and so -- we are going to have to train. We are bad at working together and we are bad at fighting together, and if we want blood we cannot just keep hitting him and hoping for the best. Maybe if we work very hard and are very, very lucky, we can do this before he gets bored of beating the shit out of us.”

You crack your can of the elixir. It fizzes in the silence. Terezi says, “Mr. Huckleberry, I will need hours out of your every night, better weapons, and for you to not assume each decision I make is in the baddest of bad faith.”

“I’ll need you,” you say, “to recognise that we are on equal footing here. Less than equal footing. I got the advantage here, and what you got is a pan full of legalese and a spirit full of bullshit, and these rude waters are mine to navigate.”

“Control freak,” she says.

“Said the bucket to the pail,” you say.

“Rude!” 

She colours, some, high turquoise under teal-stained cheeks. She has the funniest fucking reactions to coarse. She does not hit the blue mirth. But then she says to you, “Look at us. We’re stuck in the heart of Messiahdom. You’re descended from the highbloodedest of highbloods. Everything is stupid, and I must accept it. If the universe keeps sticking us together in some vile pepperberry confluence, who am I to fight?” 

Terezi takes the Faygo away from her swollen sneezer and flicks it open, raising it toward you in salute. It surprises you, that salute. The look on her face gives quiet to the pan. “Here’s to blood, and the ridiculous importance everyone places on it.”

“Here’s to blood,” you say, “it’s going to motherfucking _flow.”_

That’s how your first week ends. The both of you, clinking can. They ring out like motherfucking bells.

 

* * *

  


  


\-- CONNECTING TO SECURE SERVER --

  


  


\-- CONNECTING -- CONNECTING --

  


  


\-- FOUND CONNECTION --

  


\-- terminallyCapricious [TC] began trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG]! --

TC: fucking.  
TC: FINALLY.  
CG: DO YOU HAVE TO GIVE SOLLUX GRIEF EACH AND EVERY FUCKING TIME?  
CG: IF YOU KEEP IT UP I AM GOING TO START TO ASSUME YOU ARE HITTING ON HIM, AND THEN I AM GOING TO STICK MY HEAD IN THE WASTE COMPACTOR AND AWAIT DEATH AT THE INEVITABLE MENTAL IMAGES.  
CG: IT’D BE LIKE TWO STICKS KISSING.  
CG: AUGH.  
TC: aw, best friend.  
TC: what’s a couple of honks.  
TC: WHAT’S A COUPLE OF HONKS BETWEEN ME AND THE TROLL WHO GOT HIS DETERMINE ON TO KEEP US APART.  
TC: mother fuckin platonically, mind.  
CG: IT’S NOT LIKE THAT AND YOU KNOW IT.  
CG: JUST QUIT IT, HE’S JUST TRYING TO MAKE SURE HE AND I DON’T END UP BEING USED AS A BASE FOR SOUP. LET’S NOT WASTE OUR TEN MINUTES WITH THIS UNPALATABLE HE-BITCHED THEY-BITCHED.  
CG: I KNOW CAPTOR IS A SKINNY STREAK OF DOUCHE. I KNOW IT’S HARD. PALE QUADRANT’S NOT MEANT TO BE APART. I FUCKING KNOW, OK?  
TC: you let me register you as my moirail.  
TC: THAT ALL CHANGES IN A GOD DAMNED INSTANT.  
TC: i mean goddamn, you could be up and with me in the time it takes your ship to get its dock on and we could just  
TC: DO WHAT COMES NATURAL.  
TC: your motherfucking absence rips the soul to shreds, it’s hard, let me get my admittance on that.  
TC: IF YOU LAID PUPIL ON ME NOW, BROTHER.  
TC: you’d be proud as proud could be, yeah?  
TC: I PROMISE.   
CG: GAMZEE, I CANNOT AND AM NOT BOARDING THE GRAND HIGHBLOOD’S SHIP.  
CG: I AM NOT DISPLAYING MY NOOK FOR MIRTHFUL MISUSE. I AM NOT BERTHING ON BOARD A METAL PRISON OF SUBJUGGLATORS. YOU COULD BE THE DOUBLE-DIPPING DESCENDANT OF THE GRAND HIGHBLOOD AND THE CONDESCE AND I WOULDN’T DO IT.  
CG: I MEAN, GIVE SOLLUX A BREAK HERE TOO, HE MAY BE ABJECTLY TERRIBLE BUT I’M A FROTHING LUNATIC AT THE MOMENT. HE’S BEEN A TROOPER IN THE REALM OF HELPING ME NOT SHIT MY DRAWERS LAVISHLY.  
TC: you’re still up and having those visions. :o(  
TC: that’s bad news, bro.  
TC: ILL FUCKING NEWS.  
CG: I’M FINE.  
CG: I CAN TAKE IT.  
CG: I’M FUCKING HARDCORE.  
CG: AND THEY’RE NOT VISIONS, PRECISELY. VISIONS I COULD HANDLE. I WOULD HOLD A VISION IN MY HOT LITTLE HANDS AND WELCOME IT HOME. VISION! COME ON IN! YOU’RE A TOTAL RELIEF FROM WHAT I NORMALLY FUCKING EXPERIENCE!  
CG: IT’S MORE LIKE  
CG: LOOK, IT’S YOU I’M EVINCING SOME GODDAMNED CONCERN FOR, ASSBUTT. ARE WE GOING TO TALK ABOUT TAVROS YET?  
TC: nope.  
TC: sorry, brother, up and fucking weakness in my guts, i just can’t. gonna get my try on soon on your account.  
CG: WE CAN TAKE IT SLOW. BUT I’M GOING TO KEEP ON ASKING. WE ARE GOING TO JAM THIS ONE OUT LIKE WE WANTED TO PULP IT, ADD SUGAR, AND PRESERVE IT FOR FUTURE USE.  
TC: damn son. ;o)  
CG: SHUT THE FUCK UP.  
CG: HOW ABOUT TEREZI?  
TC: what about her.  
TC: SHE’S ALIVE.  
TC: kicking.  
TC: yelling.  
CG: HOW MUCH DO I HAVE TO NAG YOU TWO ABOUT EACH OTHER? I DO NOT LOVE NAGGING, GAMZEE. I DO NOT CLIMB OUT OF MY SLIME SIMPLY TO THE IDEA OF A GOOD HARD NAG.  
CG: I MEAN, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TWO EVEN DOING? A FEW DAYS AGO YOU HINTED THAT SHE HAD TO UNDISLOCATE YOUR LEG??  
TC: i ain’t her keeper.  
TC: we’re getting shit done.  
TC: WE ARE GETTING SHIT ACCOMPLISHED  
TC: and are getting our civil on to boot.  
CG: LIES.  
CG: YOU TWO ARE FUCKING WEIRD ABOUT EACH OTHER.  
CG: LOOK, I KNOW YOU TWO HAVE YOUR DIFFERENCES AND THAT SHE CAN IN EVERY WAY BE A KNOW-IT-ALL, CACKLING, IRRITATING WHACKJOB, BUT I NEED YOU TWO ON EACH OTHER’S SIDE RIGHT NOW.  
TC: shit.  
TC: speak of the god damn devil.

\-- gallowsCalibrator [GC] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC]! --

GC: L4T3 FOR PR4CT1C3!!!  
GC: BL4444R D1D YOU NOT1C3 HOW 1 H4V3 B33N T3LL1NG YOU TH1S 4UD1BLY FROM 4BOUT T3N F33T 4W4Y >:?  
TC: aw girl.  
TC: i am so sorry.  
TC: I JUST FUCKING BLOCK OUT THE SOUND OF YOUR NOISOME SHRILLS, IS ALL.  
GC: B33P BOOP H3Y 1T 1S 4 FL33TW1D3 4NNOUNC3M3NT TO GO FUCK YOURS3LF  
TC: eat shit and die.  
GC: 1 W1LL P4Y ON3 OF TH3 UND3RPR13STS TO P1SS 1N YOUR HORN P1L3  
TC: i already bought you tickets to get your return on home.  
TC: TO RETURN TO YOUR HOME ON BITCH PLANET.  
GC: HOW C4N 1 WH3N YOU 4R3 1TS K1NG???  
TC: you fight like a milk transfer technician.  
GC: 4PPROPR14T3  
GC: YOU F1GHT L1K3 4 HOOFB34ST  
TC: lickspittle.  
GC: DOUCH3B4G  
TC: SIGH.  
GC: WH4T3V3R YOU C4N ST4Y B3H1ND 1F YOU W4NT  
GC: 1T M34NS MOR3 BLOODSH3D FOR M3!  
TC: bloodshed.  
TC: WE HIT A MOTHERFUCKING DUMMY.  
GC: 1 UND3RST4ND COMPL3T3LY WHY YOU H4V3 G1V3N UP 4ND 1 SUPPORT 1T  
GC: 1 C4M3 UP W1TH SOM3 N3W STR4T3G13S TOD4Y 4ND 1 HON3STLY TH1NK TH3Y 4F3 4 L1TTL3 TOO COMPL3X FOR YOU TO P4RS3 SO 1 4M B3TT3R OFF PUTT1NG TH3M 1NTO PR4CT1C3 W1THOUT YOU  
TC: yap yap yap.  
TC: LIKE FUCKING WHAT?  
TC: reveal this surfeit of geniusbloat you got, sister.  
GC: NO YOU WOULDNT H4V3 L1K3D TH3M 4NYW4Y TH3Y 4R3 W4Y TOO H4RDCOR3 4ND R3VOLV3 4ROUND M4SS 4MOUNTS OF GOR3  
GC: SHHHH NO DO NOT 3V3N TYP3 4 WORD >:-  
TC: why the mothergrubbing fuck was your lipslash sideways.  
GC: 1 W4S PL4C1NG 4 F1NG3R SOFTLY TO MY FL4P 4S 1 SHUSH3D YOU  
GC: B3C4US3 YOU 4R3 4 G3NTL3 SOUL 4ND 1 W1LL NOT TR3SP4SS UPON TH33 W1TH H4RSH WORDS NOR T4LK OF P41N  
TC: SHUT  
TC: the  
TC: FUCK  
TC: up.  
TC: i’m coming.  
GC: >:]  
GC: 1 HOP3 YOU 4R3 R34DY FOR SOM3 ULTR4V1OL3NC3  
TC: MOTHER FUCKING HATCHED READY.  
TC: don’t bore me now, girl.  
GC: OH PL34S3  
GC: YOU BOR3 M3 3V3RY D4Y >:]

\-- terminallyCapricious [TC] began trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG]! --

TC: gotta jet.  
TC: TODAY WE’RE DISCOVERING WHAT PARTS OF THE BODY BLEED MOST.  
CG: I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE FIRST THING ABOUT YOUR GODDAMN LIFE.

\-- terminallyCapricious [TC] ceased trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG]! --

Second attempt you lose the fight again.

All good, Terezi assured; all according to plan. You lasted five minutes. Kept to her target -- hit the arms, watch for his, test reach. Old man didn’t even bother to weapon up that go-round, just leaned out and backhanded you til every fang in your maw shook. He took your club arm and slipped it out its socket, and cracked your partner’s ribs against the wall. You never see it coming.

Each move the old man makes is sick. You are half a second behind each time. You hit softer, you hit stupider. In him is not a single display of dismay. You are a splatterbug on his screen, and he whomps you and walks out with not one word when you can’t fight no more. Ain’t even a _little Makara,_ just jack shit and you know what, you can take his disappointment but you can’t take _nothing._

Back then you just lay there with your gimp leg and Terezi against the wall, and the moment he hit that door shut she started laughing. She exulted, “Yes!” like a fucking crazy, because sometimes you get reminder that she is just crazy as fuck.

“Oh, there’s a _pattern,”_ she says to you that morning, dabbing blood. “There’s a pattern. There’s openings. He is very -- _very_ \-- good, but he’s not God.”

You were sour. You were full up of the bitter, low on the sweet. “What angle you working?” you’d said. “You figure he’ll break his fists on our GODDAMN FACES?”

“I had considered it,” she said, “but no. Give me time. I need to process.”

Third week you were racking up the wounds. Two broke noses, five cracked ribs, three dislocations, all the lacerations you could ever fucking want. You looked like an idiot. You looked like a dull-nugged tool. Wasn’t a wonder he was staying away. Wouldn’t utter niceties that weren’t _are you ready, children?_ like he was playing at schoolfeeding, and wouldn’t give a wisp of fuck-else. His turned back echoed loud and clear: you weren’t good enough.

 _Echo Side_ palled. Shit dimmed. Walls unhued. You couldn’t pay attention a single cent of fuck during morning massacre or evening massacre both, couldn’t give a miracle its due if it had ambled up smiling; when you sit with your bowl full of mealworms and push ‘em round you see Terecita sitting up all ramrod, biting her cheek to stop herself from getting her chide on. Wants to make you chew. Wants to make you swallow. Girl won’t do a pale thing on pain of death now. 

They let you get food from the prep blocks; you wanted to sit in the painted dining halls and listen, some, first few weeks, but they look at you all doubtful and her like she’s shit-smeared. You know the underpriests call her _hoseblood, algae,_ they rock all kinds of pejorative; _cripple, feeb, blind._ The younger ones. _Squealbeast. Oinkbeast._ The adults wage different war. They don’t see her, don’t address. And why fucking should they? They’re honoured priests of the Church. Their blood is the most violet of blues. They think it is motherfucking privilege being in their presence.

You only ever heard one scrap of what they thought of her, and you still don’t fathom it. You were coming out of massacre one early morning and caught an old Cardinal talking to one of his chaplains, both big hulking motherfuckers, and wouldn’t have stopped in the corner if you hadn’t heard: “ -- not a grooming, a safeguard -- but why the legislacerator grub?”

“History repeating itself,” said the Cardinal, and they laughed a mirthless no-laugh. You would’ve listened further, but more priests were coming and you had to be a little goddamn circumspect, you know?

If it was just you shit would be different. If the Highblood and you were tighter, shit would be different. All the same, why break bread with them; it is a motherfucking privilege for them being in _your_ presence, they should kiss her fucking boot by association. They should get a lipfeel for her feet. She is a craven bureaucretin, a bean-counter, a law-picker, and they should still weep blood for her esteem. Maybe they can tell an atheist on eyeball.

Being around her is still like jerking your bulge with sandpaper, but there you are stuck. Fastened. Handcuffed. Seeping into each other, like Faygo poured in a sandhill. Admitting it is like confessing before the infinite dark that you’re a spineless bag of pus unfit to be down with the clown, but being with her outstrips the hell out of that first week of silence. You and she will always be alone together. The air strangles around you. But late at night she’ll set down her books and put down her palmhusk, and she’ll squeeze on the couch to watch the slug for hours.

  


  


Frustration’s getting to you, if you two end up sitting on your asses watching _I Shouldn’t Be Unculled!_ and _Alternia’s Next Top Model._ Her shoulder’s bony. It bites your ribs. You both squeeze knees away from each other but by the time Fleet Report comes on her horn’s nearly scraping your chin, her elbow’s in your guts. You talk seldom.

You want your fatal day to come with the old man so much it burns. It fries the nerve. You want him ringside; you want his blood, more to please than for the sake of violence. This shit ain’t for violence’s sake. You’re his descendant: you kind of want him around, you want to win your hatchright, you’re fucking twitching with it. Some days it roils around so bad in your head you want some green just to stop thinking a million thoughts at once, but the pie days are long over and you’re not going back.

Doesn’t mean you don’t want to get your blood on with everything else. Shit sucks. The air offends. You are so furious at everything some nights, especially the nights when you’re aware that you’re at the center of all rowdy jongleurs and you still can’t hear God. You can’t think of Karkat. You can’t think of your long-horned brother with his deep dark eyes and his clean fingers, you can’t remember the raps you made when you know you can remember every

_word_

you’ve EVER FUCKING READ, so much shit and none of it Tav’s.

When you stray to the training room one night and there she is, leaning over a club and drumming her digits, all you want to do is take it out on her. She barely fucking feels. You want to scrape nerve. You want to find what makes her weep, then hit it till she spills.

“I made you a thing,” she says, smiling all over her face. “You look silly wielding my specibus.”

You amble over. She hands it to you. The club’s a plain mimic of your own when you heft it, same weight, same hold, but she’s studded one edge of it with razorblades. Shit ain’t elegant. She just ladled them on, all glitter edges, the other half smooth as silk. “I realised,” says Terezi, “that we are making it unnecessarily difficult on ourselves, only having one bladed weapon. So here! Do you want to give it a name?”

She’s a fucking conundrum: young as five, old as fifty. Terezi says “My advice would be _School Of Hard Knocks -- ”_

“ -- ha, ha -- ”

“I _know!_ I am hysterical at times.”

You give it a slow spin, watch light bead on the tips of the blades. Feels okay in your wrist. Feels fine. Most weapons do, you can see them and get the motherfucking right of them first thing; you got clubs because, long ago, you thought they were a joke. Shit to play with, news to amuse. Classic subjugglator fare. Your first dip in the cliché box. Your partner says, “Half sharp to use, half clean to block.”

You give it a swing. She dances out the way, up and nimble. You say, “Why the new toy?”

“For reach,” she says, as you whistle it again. “That’s his unprotected area: neck, hands, shoulders, and he never bothers to even defend his shoulders. And speaking of shoulders, we need to better cover ourselves too.”

“He don’t protect his nug either,” you say. “Old man’s breadth and spec, who the fuck would need to? What’s your next bright idea, baby girl, A MOTHERFUCKING TRAMPOLINE?”

Empty snipes. They don’t hit. When you test out the club you decide you’ll pair it with another; you could brush it all gentle on someone and they’d bleed. Shit’s lethal. You don’t need to toss to know how you’ll have to catch to not get slit, but you know one false move and you’d bleed out your arterials on the floor. Stuck hogbeast. Dying animal. You think for a moment maybe it’s purposeful, maybe she’s recalling all the times you sung pain out of her, but it’s not her way; she just knows surprising amounts of shit about danger.

But training on the bug dummy she mocked up is phony. It’s a goddamned dummy. She wants you to practice moves, rote it around, learn to move in the same space she’s moving, but it’s working such brutal inauthenticities that you ain’t got time for it. It’s FLARP. It’s wiggler shit. You’re daywalking through each step and she can tell.

“Do you know what your problem is?” Terezi waves her hands above her head, frustrated. “Your problem is that you suffer from a gross lack of imagination!”

You’re about to tell her the myriad ways you can imagine her gore seeping, but there comes a sharp rap at the door. Standing on the threshold is a laypriest and -- worse -- a motherfucking Cardinal, up in a hood so all you see is the bitter mouth, horns casting shadow on the floor. “You have both been summoned by the Grand Highblood,” he says. “Motherfucking attend.” 

Both you and your legislacerator exchange gawk. It’s nights too early for another shot at blood: whatever, if a chance comes ready you were hatched ready, you’ll show him everything you goddamn got. You will be a thundering revelation. “That means right the fuck _now,”_ says the Cardinal.

“One moment,” says Terecita, all airy-like, as though she’s the Condescension and can keep the most mirthful of Messiahs waiting. She has brass globes. The Cardinal looks like he could get the murder act going on her, and she makes busywork -- disabling the grubmeat dummy, wiping the sweat from her brow, fixing her collar -- until you toss your new club in your sylladex and wipe grubchum from your front. “I think we have collected ourselves! Lead on.”

You get your conduction on with her, all a face-twitch conversation -- _is he holding the fight early?_ she mouths, and you just fucking shrug, you got no idea. As you sweep behind the Cardinal she raises one hand, then balls the other into a fist to crack her digit tips. Meaning’s obvious there too. _Hit high._

But you don’t get taken to the lower-level room. You get taken through a locked door to a long corridor, and the ceiling’s high tied with long coloured thread. On each thread’s hung shiny pieces of crackle or threaded with beads. A couple threads make soft nests for old skulls to sit in, yellow with age and the horns snapped off. They grin empty as you pass. They remind. A single spoke-wheel tangles up in the threads too, like it somehow ended up knotted there to mystify, and then the laypriest is dismissed and turns back: not allowed past that point, but you are.

Another corridor. Your partner’s sniffing fit to pop a sinus. The Cardinal keylocks open another door, and then you’re lead into the tent at the middle of a wide, dark room. Silk on the tent’s old and bright. The ropes by the tent are stained and worn. The fuzz on the back of your neck stands on motherfucking end.

It’s up to you and Terezi to make the final walk from the threshold to the tentflap, as the hooded Cardinal leaves you there; both of you make trot toward it as inexorable as gravity, water to a hole, blood to a wound. You wonder if this is the old man’s inner sanctum. You wonder what the fuck.

The Grand Highblood sits at a small table. His legs are crossed. His intravenous stands cluster behind him, bubbling into his hands, his arms, the nape of his nug. Bubbles of glowing chitin flicker weird shadows over everything and you realise inside each sphere’s a candle, real fire, match fire. At the table’s a tea pot, and there are cups on the table: one, two, three. The pot’s plain. Table’s plain. The cups are wide and plain. There are cushions and medical pouches going bubble and the tent peak, high, gorgeous, circus striped, but other than that it’s like walking into a sopor dream.

All plain bar the floor. A long spiral of paint starts at your feet and works its way around the tent, deviating in weird places in sick shapes, coming back and winding around and around til it disappears under the table again. Your old man’s twitched a wax-paper cylinder between two fingers, a blue curl of thin smoke at the end.

“Come sit,” he says.

  


  


You go sit. You just sit however the fuck you want, your limbs don’t slump tidy, but she tucks her feet neatly underneath her and kneels at the table. “Little sister,” he says congenially, “if you’d deign to MOTHERFUCKING PRESIDE,” and she leans up to take the steaming jug. For a second you anticipate fuck-up, but she goes by touch: takes each cup carefully and pours even measure of murky liquid, green-yellow. Not a drop is spilled.

“That’s the stuff,” says the Grand Highblood, and he takes the cup in one tube-wounded hand. With the other he taps his herbsmoke lung exfoliator into a steel container by his side. “Excuse me while I PARTAKE IN A SMOKE, wigglers.”

“Smoking is highly prohibited, sir,” says Terezi. 

You give her a look that tells her plainly to quit the shit, but all the old man says is, “Is it? What a joke,” and takes a long sip of the jug swill. Then his rheumy gaze is all for you, those deep-sunk eyes. “Lesson learned about legislacerators, Makara. THEY ARE, EACH TO A TROLL, MOTHERFUCKING NARCS.”

“Sir,” you say, with feeling, “you don’t even god damn _fathom.”_

“You don’t know the depths I AM FUCKING FATHOMING HERE, wiggler.”

“I suppose that at your time of life, sir,” says your partner, “you can take your chances!”

For a moment, the Highblood raises one wilty eyebrow, but then he barks out a dusty snigger. Sand sound. High mirth. “Little Pyrope,” he says. “TINY LAWYER. You have that correct. IN THIS INSTANCE, YOU HAVE THE MOTHERFUCKING RIGHT AND POINT OF IT. Don’t insult me by not drinking up the brew; I just proved it ain’t poisoned, did I not?”

Both of you up and go for the cups like there’s haste to make. The steam is sickly sweet, kind of earthy. Familiar. Little flecks of leaf at the bottom. You take a sip of tea and realise the familiarity, same as your partner does, and she gives a heaving sigh: “Ah, yes,” she says, flap puckered. “Moon Mist.”

You want to know why you’re there. The question burns your twitcher. It eats the buds. You choke it down with Faygo tea, watching your old man alternate between that tiny cup in his huge hand and the cigarette. No energy in him today. No pent-up shit. You want to know how he smothers himself into calm, you want to know your

god DAMNED

_hatchright._

Shit’s weird. Sitting around drinking a hot drink should be homey, should be all cute and comfortable and whatever. Instead the shadows are damper and deeper than ever in here, and he sucks them in, the old man is a well where the night goes to hide. Eventually he places his cup delicately down on the table, then taps his lung exfoliator in the steel again. 

“This is just a jaunt,” he says. “DOESN’T CHANGE THE CRUX OF THE MATTER: I don’t teach what doesn’t best me, and I ain’t motherfucking impressed as of yet. This is just a talk. A CHAT. A god damned nug-to-nug. I been reading up on you two, children.”

Another long plume of smoke. You catch Terezi’s nose twitching in dismay. Her sniffer’s twice broke now. Any more and it’s going to start sliding sideways. “Little Pyrope,” says the Grand Highblood. “How long did you have the MOTHERFUCKING KNOWING of Mindfang’s get? How long were you in the _GODDAMN CAHOOTS_ with Serket?”

There is no fury in his throat. There is just a terse consideration. A knowing. If he knows your little law worm was having a sisterhood off with Vriska Serket, you wonder what the fuck he knows about Tavros Nitram, and you’re in a lather immediately. You ball it up into your mouthful of brew, close to your flap, and you watch the girl opposite set hers down on the table with all calmness.

“Since I was five,” she says, and the shadows play off her face strange. Her voice is hard and clean. “We were a FLARP team. She and I were allies, up until she proved that she was -- a very loose cannon, and then I broke off all cahoots, collusion and conspiracy. When we received word of Private Nitram’s charge of guilt, she was my main suspect. That is all.”

Truth dressed up, with empty behind it. There’s a lot more to that story that you know. You suspect there is a whole lot more to that story you don’t have the knowing off, just the guessing, but the tired facts of how Terezi’s spent her fucking life aren’t your interest, it bores you to pus. Even so. 

“Your FLARP names,” says the Grand Highblood. “Reveal them.”

Now she hesitates. “Spinneret Mindfang,” she says slowly, “and -- the Neophyte Redglare.”

Bubbles simmer in the intravenals. Nobody says not one speck of shit up until the old man murmurs, “Neophyte, huh,” as though FLARP games are interesting, and frankly you’re kind of surprised he knows what the fuck FLARP was in the first place. You barely got your understand on FLARP, even with Tavbro busting his box trying to explain it over and over. He stubs out his herbal in the steel box and you smell its smoke: sweet. Sour. 

“Sounds like we had a case of a girl,” he says slowly, “sounds like in this girl’s case, she had the REVELATORY KNOWING OF HER HERITAGE. If I’m to guess aright I’d make a _good motherfucking guess_ that this was due to old documents -- shit that _SHOULD HAVE_ been burnt sweeps and god damn sweeps back.”

Your girl’s fingers ain’t such traitors as to tremble on the cup, or go pale. You know her from the still. Usually she’d be tapping and fussing and poking and sticking her fucking tongue in the tea, but she’s like a rod, she is metal. “Vriska read through all of the journals,” she says, like she’s talking over any old shit. Like it is any chatter. “I read through them, too. I didn’t realize what kind of documents they were at the time. In fact, I would have thought Vriska had written them had her spelling not been atrocious -- ”

“But you picked _Neophyte.”_

Her fingers are still as fucking still. “A little presumptuous, maybe,” she says. “I mean, I always admired Lady Redglare! She is the sum of all legal brilliance! But I was young, I didn’t -- ”

“Don’t you tell me you thought you had no right to it,” says the Grand Highblood softly. His eyes are for her. His paint’s turned her way. “Don’t you tell me you walk around with the knowing of your MOTHERFUCKING SIGN being the same as her _MOTHERFUCKING SIGN_ and NOT EVEN THE VAGUEST SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT.”

Mother

_fuck._

“You’re shitting me,” you say. Even you, wet with apathy, know who the Neophyte Redglare is, and you would even if you hadn’t snoozed through every lawbook in Terecita’s sylladex. “You are fucking fronting.”

“I never had confirmation!” she says, with obvious vexation now. She is holding the teacup between both her hands, high and tight. “I couldn’t ever prove. It was just a _hunch._ I mean, it was a pretty strong hunch, but -- ”

“I’ll act as holy confirmation, little sister,” says your old man. He reaches out and for a moment her hands squeeze on the cup so hard she’s like to break it, be like your old sweatbrother stupid with blue, as he very gently takes off her specs. In his big hands they don’t crack, they don’t shatter. He looks at Terezi’s skinny face with its stubborn-ass chin and her dead red eyes. “Look up. Yes. Fool, you are the MOTHER FUCKING SPIT OF HER.”

“You would have met -- ”

“Met?” He drops her glasses on the table. “ _Met?_ She was my _GOD DAMNED_ **PARTNER**.”

Tea sprays in a fine arc from Terezi’s flap. She coughs once, ragged, and then looks around wildly for something to wipe her mouth with: to your complete and neverending disgust, she sizes you up, grabs your arm, and wipes on your god damned armband. Stone cold audaciousness. You two have been around each other far too fucking long. 

“My legislacerator,” he’s saying. “Like you to Makara, like Makara to you. We were the first. Her idea, my execution: don’t they schoolfeed you?” They do schoolfeed you, schoolfeed you ‘til you puke, but history don’t feel real on a page. “ISN’T IT _SOMETHING,_ THEN. IS IT NOT A FINE BITCHTITS SOMETHING THAT YOU SIT BEFORE ME RIGHT NOW, partner to partner, subjugglator to legislacerator, just as she and me before you.”

When your partner-to-partner finishes mopping her flap, she manages to say: “But we were drawn entirely at random.”

“RANDOM IS A FAKE IDEA,” says your old man, “nothing happens at random. So what the fuck was it, Makara?”

Your lips feel oddly dry. You wet them with the last of your tea, and the word comes out heavy when you say it. Leaden. It strains the pan. “A miracle.”

“Miraculous,” he agrees. With a careless movement, he tosses his teacup over his shoulder; it falls to the spiral floor and shatters with a loud sound, a bright noise, spilling out in white powder on the spiral floor. “Someone out there wanted you two to stick together. So you just keep that in mind. You keep it in mind when you’ve got the consideration of each other, children, _REMEMBER THIS THING YOU REPRESENT.”_

Terezi’s going weirdly wan. “But I -- ”

The Grand Highblood holds up one finger to Terezi, mouth still rounding out question. The finger skin clings tight to the bones. You can see the swell of each knuckle, the blade of the claw. “One virtue, ONE QUESTION, _ONE ANSWER,”_ he says. “You want to pick my pan? You know the method and the style. Two nights to try again, and don’t disappoint me.”

Both you and your partner know a dismissal when you see one. She slips her glasses on in a hurry. You stand and bow, and then turn away from the table and the teacups and the lights. You leave him there with his tubes. You leave him there with the striped canopy. There’s a Cardinal waiting for you at the end of the corridor he’s not at liberty to cross, looking like every other bitter-flapped hooded Cardinal that ever was, but you round on your unwelcome miracle and stop her short.

Terezi gets in before you can. “I will make you a deal,” she says tersely. “If we draw the blood at the next opportunity, I get to ask the question.”

“That wasn’t what I was fixing to _GET OUR FUCKING CONVERSE ON WITH,_ Terecita.”

“I don’t care. I can’t think at the moment.”

She shoulders past you and to the hallway, cane tap-tap-tapping as she goes. You had wanted to tell her: _you better figure out the best way to beg, baby girl, because at this juncture I don’t think he’s going to LET YOU GO unless you FUCKING BARGAIN. Because at this juncture we’ll be stuck together forever, you dig?_ It baffles you that the idolised Redglare, every legislacerator’s graven idol, could ever have been so small and annoyed and ignoble. 

You skulk along after her anyway, feeling irritated. Bewildered. Bereft. It just mother fucking baffles the pan.

 

* * *

  


The three days after she pushes and pushes and pushes. Every moment you’re not eating, sleeping or using the gaper, you’re in that training room with the grubmeat dummy. Shades of _Executor._ Dummy’s been murdered two hundred and thirty-six times in different ways. By now you wish for its final death. Both of you crawl back to your atrium slow as pailed snails afterward, and first night, to your horror, she falls asleep in front of _Better Hives And Cullpits_ and drools on your shoulder. 

Second night she sits and frowns over the dummy readouts, squatting on the floor and tapping buttons on her palmhusk. Gives that shit a lick like tasting it will garner different results. “The vaguely hopeful news is,” she says heavily, “that ninety-two point six percent of our strikes are maximised for cutting efficiency. Would you like to hear the stupid news?”

“You got another motherfucking type?”

The middle-finger she awards you is distracted, and also misses your position by a long shot. “Less than four percent of our strikes make the shoulders,” she says, frowning. “We have scored _minimal_ shots on the head. Anything on the stem area was glancing. We are going to keep striking at areas he has no trouble defending, or areas with very low chance of a bleeder.”

Terezi takes off her glasses and chews on the end, all fretful. Then she tosses specs and palmhusk down and springs to her heels, pacing. She mocked the dummy up a while back so it’s got the stature of the old man, as much as she could malform, so it stands there as a towering silhouette you keep whaling on and whaling on like it’ll teach you shit. All it ever showed you was how to to hit a stiff. 

She prods at the base with one boot, then strains up with her cane measuring some shit only privy to little her; circles again, all mutter. You’re unrighteously sick of her indecision.

You say, “Strike him simultaneous.”

“This is what I have been trying to get us to _do,_ if you hadn’t realised. I understand if the subtlety was tragically lost. All hands died in the manoeuver.”

You close your eyes and toss a club down to your toe. You watch it balance as you lift your knee, wobbling some. “Hit him on two levels. Simultaneous.”

Her cane taps away. “Knee and arm.”

“Ain’t like you to indulge in so much god damn _slow,”_ you say. “Ain’t like you to be so _MOTHER FUCKING BEHIND._ Play the fool. Arm and head, since when did the old man let you near one of his caps? You think I never went to try to trip him?” 

She throws up her hands in disgust. “I know, I know, but how? Easier said than done, Mr. Makara! It’s like you said: I’d need a fucking trampo -- ”

Terezi stops. Terezi stills. Word ain’t cooled in her mouth before you get the right of it, a couple beats behind her -- and fuck you for being a couple beats behind her, you wiggler, you curdle-panned animal -- while you’re flipping the club back into your hand. It’s you she circles now. Like a sharkfish. You’re blood in her bay. “Crouch,” she demands, but you’re saying, “Please, I got more lift than you could ever GOD DAMN JUMP -- ”

“Show me,” she says. Each tooth gleams white. Her eyes shine red. Without specs her oculars are red as paint, red as strawberry Faygo. You nearly see sparks on her. “Show me how.”

You make a cradle for her foot, real small, and with a _hup!_ she steps up into it. She don’t have anything to her. She’s sticks. She is finger bones. With one hand you slam her up, and she jumps -- fluffs the first launch but you can see the way of it, how the score of her blade would come down on shoulder. Next turnaround she does it running, and then you’re both launching yourselves forward in the same fucking breath: you tossing her up, your club sailing round in the same breath. Like a beat. Two syllables. It’s slow-ass incompetency on the second too, but on the third you’ll have it, be able to draw your club and lift her up without ever showing your hand to the old man.

Third go you slam into the dummy like the backhand of God. Terezi’s laughing her butt off, fit to bust, picking up her palmhusk: “Perfect strike,” she says, and then she tosses it over her shoulder like she doesn’t give a fuck. The movement is uncanny. The movement’s the Grand Highblood’s, and that is god damned unnerving, just for that moment. “He’ll take out one of us, but the second one can use the opening. Yes! I smell success and it smells delicious!” 

She is dancing up to you, and you realise you’re smiling at her dumb enthusiasm. Her wiggler excitement. Young as five, old as fifty. You feel old joy: joy you felt first time you looked that corpse-to-be and saw its mouth gibber, and you knew how to detach him. How to work a body. It’s easy. It’s all so fucking easy. You feel good, which is why you let her get fistfuls of your shirt and yank you down, mess up your follicles. Feels like how it did when you were stoned as fuck and she played pretend friend. 

Used you be you wouldn’t have put up with that shit. You’re laughing now. Baby girl knows what you can do. She wants to stick digit in your maw again, you won’t bite, you got to keep her getting her guess on. Besides, everything’s fucking funny: the adrenaline sweet as sopor, the way you think up blood, think up ease. When her face blurs all close you ain’t expecting her 

_mother_

FUCKING

mouth.

  


  


She kisses all hard. She kisses all hasty. She kisses just once, swift on your smacker, and then she yanks back and stares in stupid stupefaction. You want to burn that look off her face and into your eyelids so you got instant reference. Seems like a thousand sweeps ago you got all mouth to mouth on her on the _Executor;_ kissing her mouth because it was so motherfuckin’ woeful, because it was all twisted up just so. Like she was thinking about ripping your throat out with long teeth and leaving you to drown in your effluent. You could pop her nug off her shoulders right now, you think, could just _END HER,_ only your pan slips on that one and you kiss her fucking frown.

Flap’s dry. So’s hers. You mash mouths wondering how the fuck it works when another mouth is mashing back. You end up getting sucking face for a couple before you remember what you’re even doing, before you remember where you’re at, and when Terecita drops your shirt you are a regret faucet. You are all qualm. She stares like she wants to boil her twitcher and you want to yank her hair, just for how fucking stupid she looks. You want to yank her hair. You want to kiss her goddamn face again. 

“I always promised myself,” she says levelly, backing up, “that I would never do something so inutterably silly as smooch someone and then run away.”

Terezi crouches down and picks up her glasses, picks up her husk. “However,” she says, “I am beginning to see its innate appeal! Goodbye!”

You think: who the hell gets their cut and run on after they -- _goddamnit._

 

* * *

  


Fuck your life. Fuck your pupation. Your partner plays possumbeast the next night and you’re stewing, wishing you weren’t, wanting to switch off your pan. You do what anyone else would up and fucking do, no shame in the doing: you sit on your glutes, you eat grub puffs, and you hit up for chat.

\-- terminallyCapricious [TC] began trolling twinArmageddons [TA]! --

TC: let’s play pretend.  
TC: let’s pretend we had the whole conversation.  
TC: WHERE I CONVINCE YOU TO LET ME TALK TO WHAT IS RIGHTFULLY MINE.  
TA: ok gz.  
TA: ii’m pretendiing riight now. oh, what’2 thii2? you fuckiing lo2t.  
TA: you were really unconviinciing in my thiinkpan, 2orry.  
TC: has anyone ever whispered the news in your shell.  
TC: THAT YOU ARE A HATCH BITCH?  
TC: that you are punk in the nugget.  
TC: THAT YOU ARE A SCRAWN-PANNED FUCK.  
TA: 2hut up.  
TC: you will motherfuckin shut.  
TC: YOUR MOTHERFUCKIN MOUTH.  
TC: actually, know what.  
TC: i ain’t up and feeling this tonight, brother.  
TC: feels like i’m trying to trash talk how much i hate you.  
TC: WHEN I JUST THINK YOU FUCKING SUCK.  
TA: ii don’t care, but ok.  
TA: kk’2 not here and they never tell me when he’ll be back.  
TA: and iif iit iintere2t2 you the de2iign2 ii have on your clown a22 are zero, ii ju2t thiink you’re 2ome loony kk and tz liike for no fuckiing rea2on ii can dii2cern.  
TC: you known her a long time.  
TC: am i correct.  
TA: oh my god ii do not want two have thii2 conver2atiion.  
TC: AM I MOTHER FUCKING CORRECT.  
TA: protiip: repetiitiive yelliing ju2t aggravate2 my pre-exii2tiing condiitiion of not giiving a fuck.  
TA: but yeah, ii have. 2he’2 my friiend.  
TC: SUCH A BEAUTIFUL FUCKING THING.  
TC: this troll disease called friendship.  
TA: ii don’t know why they have thii2 2iick fa2ciinatiion wiith you.  
TA: you’re liike 2ome kiind of hyperpathetiic magnet.  
TA: ii can at lea2t make 2ure kk’2 ok, but iif you fuck around wiith tz ii wiill knock down all the fiirewall2 in your head and pii22 on your furniiture.  
TC: always cute.  
TC: CUTE’S ALWAYS THE WORD.  
TC: when a mustardblood gets his bluster on.  
TC: your eyes are lies.  
TC: your threat’s fret.  
TC: SHIT’S ALL PRECIOUS IN HERE RIGHT NOW.  
TA: wow, 2top rappiing.  
TC: so.  
TC: how in all fuck do you nug tell as to why someone kisses you.  
TA: OH MY FUCKIING PSIIONIIC GOD.  
TA: LET ME TRAN2FER YOU TWO THE ONLY PER2ON IIN THE UNIIVER2E WHO WANT2 TO HEAR.

  


\-- CONNECTING TO SECURE SERVER --

  


  


\-- CONNECTING -- CONNECTING --

  


  


\-- FOUND CONNECTION --

  


\-- arsenicCatnip [AC] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC]! --

AC: :OO « unmeowciful shit!  
AC: :33 « which of my purrecious ships got sunk??  
TC: uh.  
AC: :33 « h33 h33 you dont understand gamz33  
AC: ;33 « a cat always purrlays the long game  
TC: :o\  
AC: :(( « oh boo  
AC: :33 « my moirail says i shouldnt be having this confursation right now  
AC: :33 « he is purrobably correct  
AC: :33 « *the feline slinks away with a dejected bbs, tail swinging in a way which indicates this is not yet ofur*

\-- arsenicCatnip [AC] is now AWAY! --

\-- arsenicCatnip [AC] gave the reason: under fire, busy defending munitions dump \--

TC: wow.

You try to outwait her. You sit on the platform in the atrium. You watch the audiovisual slug. You pick around with her dinner and yours when the underpriest delivers it, just to fuck with her, but she only comes in when you’re half-cuped on the couch with the fuzz still on blare. Terezi turns off the set and jogs your elbow, and you were awake, you just wanted to see what the hell she’d do.

“Mr. Grape Faygo,” she says quietly. “Get some sleep. I do not want our chances ruined for tomorrow simply because you were being stubborn.”

You say, “Getting your motherfucking pale on again, wicked sis? I fallen back into slack ways you got to _PULL ME OUT OF?”_

For a moment Terezi goes all ash. Then she stares you down, dead in the ocular, and she sticks out her long tongue. “Get some fucking rest!” she says, and her shit’s forced, you got the measure of it. “You smell like tired. This is an instance where we want the same things. And so: I am going myself off to my just reward, and I will see you in several hours -- ”

“Coward,” you say.

She considers that. She hovers in her doorway, head tilted out, horns orange angles. “Unprepared,” she corrects. “Good morning, Subjugglator.”

Somehow -- you don’t quite remember deets -- you get the fuck back to your own recuperacoon, and you shed your covers to slide inside. You ain’t a fan of the way sopor smells now. It sours the nosehole. It weakens the tongue. But you sleep, and if you’re slow to wake when the alarm in your block tells you that you’ve had the allotted shut-eye, you don’t feel wholly like a putrefying sac.

Your partner’s left a pile outside your door. Someone’s fucked off to the quartermaster. Folded up’s the kit that priests skin themselves in, the banded stripes of a full Messiah. Light chitin armour. Waist-guard, arm-guards -- wraparounds, not just the shit-cloth arm bands you came issued with -- all of it stiff stuff, grub plate, hardened with keratin pastes. You kick it blockwards and feel a fool putting it on, like a wiggler playing at dress-ups, but when it’s on it and the wardrobifier seals your symbol you look okay. Looks tent ordained.

When your law-bore adherent comes out, she’s all dressed up with somewhere to burn. Gone is the skinny Soliciteen get-up. She dressed simple, red boots, teal coat. Looks clean. Looks smooth. Looks even less like she belongs in a ship full of the wicked faithful, which was your sister’s fucking intention, was it not: that she’s a bureaucretin born, not down with the clown. Separating herself from _Echo Side_. Distancing from you.

“I found you, Ms. New Brutal,” you say.

Terezi startles, then she tosses back her hair and she laughs. Laugh’s all screech. It scrapes walls: _hehehehe,_ a crackle cackle. You notice her wig’s getting long just like yours is getting long, no training trims to keep it in check.

“It is disgusting,” she says, “that you are ever legitimately funny to me. What a dreadful trick to play. One of these days you might actually be hilarious! Shall we, douchebag?”

“Judgement day,” you say. “Let us be _UNRIGHTEOUSLY JUDGED.”_

 

* * *

  


  


Your old man draws after the fifth minute.

It’s a triumph when he pulls club. Just a simple pair of throwers, spectrum-coloured, but when he pulls -- and you’re beaten bloodied, but not that bloodied or beaten -- you got him on the offense instead of the defense, and both you and Terezi tighten. You focus. You narrow your world. All that exists is the club and the sword, the blood and the fight, the push and the pull. Both of you pull back as his motherfucking reach extends and you see her, snapping at the waist, missing a blow that whistles overhead --

Seventh minute he’s out to finish you.

The Grand Highblood moves like an ocular mote. He moves like the light blinding an eye. One moment he’s there, then he’s flanked you -- never looking like he’s expending energy. He don’t break sweat. He goes all calm and gets between you and her again and again, he ain’t letting you regroup -- your brain goes quiet and this is all there is. The blood is all there _EVER FUCKING WAS._

His club catches your legislacerator on the backswing and that’s it for her, you think, fuck. Chance is dwindling. She goes down and rolls a couple toward you, then goes still. But even though there’s wet swelling at her face, she’s mouthing: go! and you realise she took a dive.

Old man thinks she fucked up. He’s stepping towards her all idly, club in his digits, ready to keep her down -- you thank the fractious band of minstrels that Terezi Pyrope is a sneaky sack of turquoise-wet shit and you go for her. You’re running. He takes you for playing rescue, you fucking know it, because his gaze swaps from her to you and his clubs start spinning --

She handsprings back. Her bootheel digs into your palm but it makes no mind, it makes no matter: one second to launch her, one to get your club. Time goes slow. The room shuts down. Each shadow gathers around him and rattles your horns and all the cold goes out of you, but a second’s not enough for his fear purposes -- all you know is that the Grand Highblood sweeps back his motherfucking club and slams it into you like a body to be culled, and that for a moment all is black.

When you come to there is your baby girl. She crouches next to you like a happy gargoyle, skinny face all lit, and there are thin splatters over her face. Indigo droplets. You think they’re yours, for a sec. You think they are property of you, but then you struggle up to sit with your breath a chestcage howl and there’s the old man.

The old man touches his shoulder. The old man touches his long cut. The old man’s fingers come back wet.

“That,” he says, “is what I like to _MOTHER FUCKING SEE.”_

The Grand Highblood gestures you forward. You stagger up, and you’re pissed that you have to lean some on Terezi to make those first few steps over. You’re too dazed to protest. It sings through your veins. The thrill runs up and down your spinal cord. His crabbed hands press into his blood, and then he’s got his indigo thumbprint pressed to your forehead, then to your partner’s. Fuck. You’ll never wash it off.

“Fine children,” he says. “ _WORTHY CHILDREN._ Prodigal children. I UNDERESTIMATED YOUR SHIT. I did not expect you to get this in THREE GOD DAMNED ATTEMPTS, wigglers, but now I will expect you to SUCCEED IN ALL MY LESSONS AT ONE.”

Terezi’s tongue keeps roaming around the inside of her mouth. She turns her head and politely spits out a tooth. She gobs out teal. Her facemask’s stained. You’re leaning on her heavy, and you can hear all pain hisses when her breath comes through her throatchute. You don’t feel pain any more. Your pan is a hallelujah scream.

“We’ve completed the task?” she says.

“YES,” says the old man.

“To your satisfaction?” she says.

“YES,” says the old man.

“Then I would like to ask a question,” she says, “please.”

The Grand Highblood gestures to her. She gets the meaning of it before you do, and she squirms your arm off her shoulders and goes to get his chair. She scrapes it over to him and he settles down in his sitpillar, all fake decrepit, all arranging his creaks. Then she comes back and noses under your arm again like you’ll fall, but you realise: you were swaying on the spot.

“Hit me,” he says grandly. “If you will appreciate the _GOD DAMNED PUN.”_

It takes a moment for her to spit out words. That’s not like Pyrope. She has all the questions first thing, but now it seems like her voice comes at the other end of a long tunnel. You hear her dimly. “Why are you choosing to have me aboard the _Echo Side_ ,” she says, “when I could much better serve you as a legislacerator, with the Cruellest Bar?”

Your old man rests his chin in his hand. His shoulder seeps. “You think you don’t belong,” he says, “among the Subjugglator faithful?”

“Sir, I am not a priest,” she says, and you’re too nug-addled to clap hand over her mouth when she clinches: “I am not even a believer, to be rigorously honest!”

But there’s no fire from him. No brimstone. Not even a frown. He just nods all acknowledgement. “You make a promise to me, little sister,” he says. “You work the WICKED PROMISE THAT YOU BELIEVE _NOTHING._ Be no hypocrisy. YOU STAND BEFORE ME AND YOU TELL ME OF YOUR ATHEISM? Then I demand you pick one road and pick it _ALL YOUR DAYS.”_

Terezi hesitates. You feel it tremor through her. “Sir?”

“Who do you mother _fucking_ FOLLOW, tiny Pyrope?”

“The law.”

“Then you love law and no other,” he says. “THEN YOU LOVE NO OTHER BUT LAW.”

“Necessarily! So you understand I should be serving you _in_ the law,” she persists. “You could transfer me. I could take my bar exam -- I’m ready -- and I could serve the Church that way. Wouldn’t I be serving the Church in that capacity, anyway? Shouldn’t I be with my own kind?”

There is bitterness in that. _My own kind._ Ain’t her words. That’s a pain you did not anticipate. You did not anticipate her antipathy toward the blood system, and you did not anticipate how sour her heart would get. All the Highblood does is look at her, like his oculars can peel.

“Let me tell you a story,” he says.

You hear her breath. You hear yours, sinking into your oxygen sponges. You see the spots in your vision. You think to yourself that you are probably stem-deep in a motherfucking concussion, but who gives a shit. Now is not the time.

“This is a _science_ story,” says your old man, and for a moment his voice is patronizing. It is sour with sarcasm. “Open your aurals. Hear what I _FUCKING DELIVER._ Once there was a young subjugglator who had won his high throne _BY RIGHT,_ IN BLOOD. Once there was a young legislacerator sent to document the LAW OF THE CHURCH, entrench it in our _BLESSED EMPIRE,_ and though she was NEW AND UNTRIED I was mother fucking NEW AND UNTRIED and we would code it as one.

“We uncovered wicked heresies. WE ARRESTED ALL POISONS. I tell you, children, she stood at the foot of my throne and ran my enemies down, enemies of the faithful, ENEMIES OF THE LAW, and we would watch them SWING IN THE NIGHT AIR TOGETHER. And we still had thirst for more.

“And let me tell you this, wigglers: we were young and I found her GOD DAMN _FAIR_ TO BEHOLD.”

It cuts through concussion. Gorge rises. Gut twists. Out the corner of your jelly you get a load of Terezi: her mouth is a moue of rising disgust.

“Come on,” says the Grand Highblood. “Where do you think grubs come from, _MOTHERFUCKING METEORS?”_

  


  


You make a noise all involuntary. It sounds like: _augh,_ and Terezi makes a noise all involuntary and it sounds like: _eugh._

The Grand Highblood rises from his chair. He reaches forward like he did in his sanctum and he touches your partner’s chin, claw large and light on her. “Don’t belong,” he says. “Don’t BELONG? She _never loved aught_ but her office and me. DON’T BELONG? When you both are the children of that love? THIS IS YOUR RIGHT AND DESTINY, AND YOU BETTER FUCKING BEGIN THE TASK IT SETS YOU.”

He beholds both your faces. The old man laughs. His laugh is an indulgence, a slap, like someone else’s lusus having to squawk to their wiggler about how it’s really him on Twelfth Perigee’s Eve bringing in the offal. You never got told that, on account of how your lusus never made it to Twelfth Perigee’s Eve unless he was a couple cycles late, and Karkat had to tell you when you were six. You didn't believe him for motherfucking sweeps.

“Here’s your task: I am waging war against an old heresy,” he says. “And you two -- my precious two -- _MY LITTLE CHILDREN...”_

The Grand Highblood spreads out his hands. His smile is a skull smile.

“... are going to be my Inquisitors.”


	6. ACT TWO, CHAPTER TWO

**ACT TWO:**

_Sins Of The Fathers_

**CHAPTER TWO**

* * *

  


CG: INQUISITOR?  
CG: **INQUISITOR**?  
CG: HOW INQUISITIVE ARE WE GODDAMN TALKING HERE. RANK IT FROM ONE, WHICH WOULD BE A NOTED LACK OF FUCKS GIVEN, TO TEN, WHICH WOULD BE INQUISITIVELY SHOVING YOUR FROND INTO EVEN THE VAGUEST OF CURIOSITIES, BECAUSE YOU’RE JUST THAT INQUISITIVE.  
CG: JUST WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TWO MEANT TO INQUISIT? BECAUSE NOBODY I KNOW LEGITIMATELY BELIEVES IN A PARTY PLANET OR THAT FAYGO IS A DELICIOUS BEVERAGE, SUITABLE FOR ALL OCCASIONS. NOBODY BELIEVES THIS BECAUSE IT’S STUPID.  
TC: honk. :o(  
CG: NOT TO TAKE A STEAMING SHIT ON YOUR COLOSSAL MINDSCREW OF A CLOWN RELIGION OR ANYTHING.  
CG: SORRY, BRO.  
TC: i know you ain’t a faithful.  
TC: i know you don’t kick it messiah style.  
TC: THAT’S OKAY.  
TC: SHIT’S ALRIGHT, YOU KNOW?  
TC: i do the motherfucking believing for us.  
CG: I DON’T WANT TO GO TO CLOWN HEAVEN.  
TC: maybe you’re already.  
TC: IN CLOWN HEAVEN.  
TC: ;o)  
CG: BLEAAARGH. NEXT.  
CG: I MEAN IT, WHAT CONSTITUTES ‘HERESY’ HERE?  
TC: ain’t nothing for you to get your worry upped and over.  
TC: AIN’T NOTHING FOR YOU TO HAVING GOING GETTING FRET.  
TC: some group who got a beef with the church.  
TC: GOT THEIR VENDETTA, YOU KNOW?  
TC: they want a war.  
TC: THEY WANT THE WALLS TO MOTHERFUCKIN RUN WITH MOTHERFUCKIN BLUE.  
TC: or some shit?  
TC: terezi keeps up and butting in, leaves my deets unspecific.  
CG: TEREZI HASN’T BREATHED A FUCKING WORD OF THIS TO ME.  
CG: AS FAR AS I WAS CONCERNED, HER GREATEST UPSET ABOARD THIS CLOWN CAR WAS THAT SHE HAS HAD A SURFEIT OF SHITTY SODA POP.  
TC: don’t need to worry none about her either.  
TC: OLD MAN MOTHERFUCKING LOVES HER LIKE HER GLUTES WERE JEWELS.  
TC: no matter what doubt she spews.  
TC: AND SPEW DOUBT SHE DOES.  
CG: TO BE HONEST WITH YOU, THIS CULTIST INQUISITION STUFF SOUNDS LIKE GRADE-A BULLSHIT. TOP QUALITY TURD.  
CG: HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THAT THIS IS JUST ANOTHER EXCUSE TO PUT PEOPLE TO THE CULLPIT FOR SHITTY REASONS?  
TC: :o(  
TC: this ain’t arbitrary.  
TC: THIS AIN’T RANDOM PURGE.  
TC: no matter of nonbelievers, right?  
TC: matter of not believing all hardcore.  
CG: IT’S A MATTER OF WELL WHOOPTY DOO, MAYBE PEOPLE DO HAVE A LEGITIMATE REASON TO HATE AND FEAR OUR HIGHBLOOD OVERLORDS???  
CG: FOR FUCK’S SAKE, GAMZEE, DON’T BUY INTO THIS. LISTEN TO WHAT YOU’RE BEING TAUGHT. AND FOR THE FIRST AND ONLY TIME IN MY SHORT, REPULSIVE LIFE, AS YOUR MOIRAIL I ORDER YOU THUS: LISTEN TO TEREZI.  
TC: do i got to.  
CG: YES.  
TC: do i got to act like it.  
CG: HELL NO.  
CG: WHY GIVE HER THE SATISFACTION.  
TC: heh heh.  
TC: THAT’S WHAT I’M MOTHER FUCKING HONKING ABOUT. :o)  
CG: AND MAKE SURE SHE DRINKS SOME GODDAMN WATER, SHE IS EVEN MORE INSUFFERABLE ON A SUGAR HIGH.  
CG: LOOK. I DON’T MEAN TO GIVE YOU SHIT ABOUT THIS, I’M JUST GOING THROUGH SOME TOUGH FUCKING TIMES HERE AND I’M NOT CERTAIN ABOUT ANYTHING ANY MORE.  
CG: AND BOTH MY SUPPORTERS HERE ARE CRAZY AS FUCKING GLOBES.  
TC: both?  
TC: ain’t heard of a both, dogg.  
CG: FUCK.  
CG: ME.  
CG: YES, THERE’S A BOTH. I JUST. FUCK  
CG: YEAH. NO. THIS IS A CONVERSATION THAT NEEDS TO BE JAMMED OUT LATER.  
TC: HEY, BELOVED.  
TC: no secrets between us.  
CG: DO NOT GIVE ME PIOUS SASS ON THIS, BOZO.  
CG: YOU STILL CAN’T TALK ABOUT TAVROS.  
CG: JUST DO ME A SOLID, KEEP YOUR CANALS OPEN ABOUT THIS HEAP OF HERESY MUCUS AND KEEP TALKING TO ME.  
TC: if my digits fell off i’d talk to you.  
TC: if my twitcher cold wilted i’d talk to you.  
TC: if my pan drained i’d talk to you.  
CG: I JUST FUCKING WORRY.  
TC: don’t wanna give you cause, best friend. :o(  
CG: YOU’RE IN THE HEART OF THE CREEPY CLOWN COMMUNITY.  
CG: YOU’RE THE HEIR TO SOMETHING WE CANNOT REALLY FATHOM.  
CG: IT IS RIDICULOUSLY EASY TO GO ALONG WITH WHATEVER THE FUCK PEOPLE SAY YOU ARE IF THEY THROW AROUND ENOUGH SHIT AND GLITTER.  
CG: YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO ME BECAUSE I AM SWOLLEN WITH WISDOM FAR BEYOND MY SWEEPS, A GODDAMN NEXUS OF MATURITY AND ENLIGHTENMENT SO POWERFUL I SHIT PARABLES EACH TRIP TO THE GAPER.  
TC: sounds like a stress.  
TC: A STRESS TO THE ASS.  
CG: OK. I KNOW IF YOU’RE STILL MAKING CHUTE JOKES, YOU’RE THE GAMZEE I KNOW AND CHERISH FOR SOME REASON.  
CG: KEEP IT THAT WAY, ALRIGHT? EVEN IF YOU’RE NOW SOME BIG-SHOT HOITY-TOITY SUSPICIOUSLY EVIL INQUISITORIAL TEAM, IF YOU TURN AWAY FROM ME I WILL REACH THROUGH TROLLIAN AND SCREAM AT YOU UNTIL YOU BOTH HAVE TO BE TAKEN AWAY TO BE KILLED. GOT IT?  
CG: JUST DON’T LET IT GO TO YOUR HEAD.  
TC: it ain’t even a thing.  
TC: not one spit of a thing.  
TC: SHE AND I?  
TC: I AND SHE?  
TC: WE ROCK IT MOTHER FUCKING HUMBLE.

  


  


CG: ONE LAST THING BEFORE I GO. SHIT, I’M ALREADY OVER TIME.  
CG: THOLLUCKS SAID YOU HAD SOMETHING TO JAM WITH ME, THE IMPLICATIONS OF WHICH WERE SO DISGUSTING THAT HE CLAIMS HIS “BULGE DIED.”  
CG: THE MEMORIAL WILL BE HELD NEXT PERIGEE, ATTENDED IN AN EMPTY ROOM BY ALL WHO CARE. ANYWAY, WHAT WAS IT?  
TC: don’t worry.  
TC: wasn’t a deal.  
CG: WHAT HAPPENED TO “NO SECRETS BETWEEN US”, NOOKMUNCH.  
TC: ain’t in secrecy.  
TC: PUT IT OUT YOUR NUG, ALRIGHT?  
TC: i swear i got this one under control.

  


* * *

  


Each evening you got your routine. You roll out your sopor and you stand under the trap spray, turning it to hot as it will scald. You slough off slime and turn it cold as it will chill, and then you bore yourself with the fang paste and the bristle stem and the towel. Ablution block’s yours second. You stand there in a fug of partner reek, her soap and her foam and her hair lather, and when you’re dry you bind your mane and put your face on.

Routine is aimless bullshit ‘til your paint. You could put your face on blind. You could put your face on with stump arms. When you make full subjugglator they’ll put your design on the cut nug of your first cull, and they’ll pickle it and put it aside until the day you motherfucking die. 

White grubgrease first all over, up into your hair. Then the grey paste worked into your palpebral flaps and outlining the oculars. Eyes first, muzzle after. Swoops down your cheek orbits. Last is the two spots right up above your eyes and a spray of fixative, and then you’re you, not someone undressed. Paint is the first sacrament. To paint is to testify.

When at last you leave the block there she is, always, sitting in the atrium with a cup of caffeine and her tie untied. Both of you get work on the evening necessary: to bolt your fucking food.

“Pass the jam,” says your partner. 

Nutrition cart comes right to your doorway now, delivered hot by a couple underpriests. You’re at it evening to motherfucking dawn, and if you don’t fill belly now and stuff pocket for later, you’re stuck with nothing but elixir until the morning horn honks. You and Terezi stuff your maws with frazzled pork hide and preserves, all liberal amounts of beetle in the grubmeal and fat on the oink hide, and you never ate so well back in your lawnring. Your dad never thought about that, eating. 

When the priests happen on you in the corridor now, they are all a-bow. They are all a-honk. They fucking fall over themselves. All their scraping rattles the canal. Your fortunes have changed now, don’t you know? They may grind molar that you’re top of the horn pile, but they cannot do a single thing. There is not one single thing they can do. 

You’re _Inquisitor_ motherfucking Makara. She’s _Inquisitor_ motherfucking Pyrope. You’d welcome a punch thrown in your direction. You would embrace it. You follow the old church adage of _talk shit, get hit,_ but maybe they can see and taste your readiness for violence. Nobody comes at you, brother.

All generous, you upend jelly on her hide. “Put some ass in your pants. You look like a starveling nail.”

“You look like a knuckle in a subjugglation uniform,” she says, slathering jam. “I request that you do not talk to _me_ about butts.”

At least you’re both talking. Silence is war. By treaty you don’t go into the territory of the Grand Highblood’s revelation. You don’t look at her facefront to find trace of yours. Sometimes you feel like you collect the ghosts of other people’s secrets, and you walk around a haunt.

“If we are off the subject of ass scholarship,” says Terezi, slicing bacon, “it is now _your_ duty to get the meals from the underpriests. I have sneer fatigue.”

“They’re just underpriests,” you say. “Mere underpriests only. Are you Inquisitor Pyrope or goddamn _WHAT?_ Could use one underpriest as a chair, two as your motherfucking table.”

She pops a tineful of food in her mouth and says thickly, “Down, boy.”

“What’ll they do, motherfucking _spit_ in my motherfucking _food?”_

“Maybe! They will definitely spit in mine!” On the other side of the caegar is your partner, who to them is all civilities: but it’s her politeness they think pestilence. She ain’t popular. “I would like to eat _one_ meal that is not a significant percentage of clown spit.”

“Wicked sister, that is casteist,” you say. “Can’t tell a clown by their spit.”

“It tastes like Faygo,” she says. You sop up husk juice and jam slurry with a slice of loaf. “When I leave _Echo Side_ I am never touching soda again, not even the un-shitty kind. Not even the type you mix with cold grubcream to make grubcream floats.”

Your partner sets down her tines and rests chin on her paw. She sounds wan and wistful. She sounds full up with regret. You say, “Who says we’re ever leaving?”

“Gamzee.” Terezi always rolls your name around her flap like a sweet, gets it ugly with her tongue. The shadows beneath her eyes are bitter shadows. These days for her are weary days. “Refresh me. What is the Old Alternian root meaning for inquisition?”

“I ain’t your performing barkbeast, baby girl -- ”

“Indulge me.”

You scrape the last beetle from your bowl. You squeak your spoon round the edge so it whines, high and rusty, which always makes her bare her fangs in pain. Terezi don’t like the rough sounds: not for her is decay and shrill. She sits opposite in her neat new jacket with her specs polished, her horns shone, like she ain’t older than the girl you first met. Like she ain’t angrier.

 _“Inquisition,”_ you rattle. “Root: _to search. To examine._ Understood examination: of those who offend canon law or pledge heresy against the Church of Mirthful Messiahs. Also understood: expurgation of -- ”

She waves her hand. They’re her syllables. First time she told you them, terse, you gave her info the wicked consideration it deserved, which had been to call her _word nerd_ and spend a couple flipping each other off. “The key word,” she says, “is _search._ We will not be staying here. The Church would have bigger problems in its Faygo-stained hallways if we had to Inquisit on _Echo Side.”_

Terezi’s right. It grinds you. Cardinals might up and call you brother, now, sometimes _little brother_ which is their way of getting motherfucking cute, but her they call _sister legislacerator._ Not wholly a sis. Other. One of them even calls her _little Neophyte,_ and you should’ve taken a snap of her face when she first got that: should’ve snagged her startle. She feigns gracious now, but you know it for her flinch.

“Get to the point,” you say. “We run around. We play motherfucking cop shop?”

“We run around,” she says. “We play motherfucking cop shop.” Terezi pushes around the last of her oink hide, mouth troubled. “And who will we play cop shop to, Mr. Plumberry? After all he’s told us, who are our targets going to be, and why? And why us -- you his descendant, me his -- _ugh_ \-- matesprit’s descendant, especially if we are his descendants -- and not the laughsassins? It is a very public job!”

This is not a question you can answer with listening ears. It’s not even a question you can answer easy. Of course, she’s a down and dirty sophist; she is making rhetoric. She doesn’t desire an answer. She just wanted to make you think about the question.

“Aw, girl, you shy and retiring petal sprout,” you say. “Your name was always going to be put in bright lights. You were always going to work the wicked publicity, _little Neophyte.”_

“If you begin calling me that too,” she says sharply, “I will fill your recuperacoon with hot wax. We have reached maximum silly-nickname limit.”

You are beginning to comprehend her flinches. Her body quakes aren’t in irritation. They are in reluctance. “So you ain’t shamed by fame, you’re shamed by _Church_ fame -- ”

“Gamzee,” she says. “I think I am beginning to get afraid.”

The way she says it is simple and neat. The way she says it curls on the tongue. You think about the man who made you and the idea she knows fear makes you wanna laugh. It makes you want to belly chuckle. It also makes you angry, her putting her vulnerability right there on display where anyone can seize it with dirty hands.

So you say, “We don’t even fucking _KNOW_ FEAR YET.”

You reach for the frazzle on her abandoned fork. She snags before you can. With quick fingers, she slides the morsel off the prongs. She reaches out until the cooling oinkhide’s at your lips, fingertips brushing, the oily scent of frazzle filling your nose. Maybe a while back she would have legit fed you like a nourishing pacification; now she snatches it back the moment you grudgingly yaw your flap to eat, and your partner pops the whole thing in her mouth instead. 

“Oh wow, I love bacon,” says Terezi, licking each cheating digit. “Bacon is delicious.”

Sometimes you nearly fucking

_LOATHE_

her.

Once you’re out, you’re out. You move quick through _Echo Side’s_ cool halls, splattering the dimness with yourselves, hurrying your asses lest the old man call you tardy. Your old man likes you punctual. Now that you don’t have to bother with the salute and the bow to every priest ranked above you, you get along just fucking fine. It’s them who scrape in your wake, Terecita clattering her cane on the floor like there ain’t a care in her pan.

You still have to dutifully give whoop if you pass a purple-robed Cardinal, but you don’t have to stop. You don’t genuflect or salute, don’t work wicked obsequiousness. This fact makes you downright immodest, but you ain’t the only one. You see the set of your legislacerator’s shoulders; her spine is held like a sword. Her nug is a club. This is her being the _little Neophyte,_ and this is her angering each priest who don’t keep their counsel about blood.

One of these is the hallway guard. It’s the same motherfucker who gave you distaste when you first boarded _Echo Side,_ the one you awarded a busted sniffer. They keep giving him detail at the gate to the old man’s outer halls. He’s reined in his grief some. The way he beholds you is south of friendly, but the way he looks at your partner -- when her head’s just so, and her teeth are bared in a rictus grin -- the way he looks is unrestrained. His eyes chide. His hands say murder. 

“Give us passage, please,” says Terezi, all ease. He doesn’t even look at her. He looks over her head at you. You don’t make bother. She takes her cane and she smacks it into the metal at his feet, making a bright sound, noisy clanging: “Brother, I humbly request passage.”

“Don’t,” says the guard, up and difficult, “call me mother fuckin’ _brother.”_

His nose didn’t heal too well. There is harsh tremble in him. For a moment you’re sorry, almost, something near sorry, because this is the kind of subjugglator who closes his eyes and is first up to take Faygo shower when you’re all in massacre. He’s into the whimsy. He is capricious as fuck. But he missed something along the way, which is that your partner is the hand of the _mother FUCKING CHURCH,_ and he is a _POOR_ NUG-SPILLED _PRE-CORPSE._

But she says quiet: “If I have offended -- ”

“Your _BLOOD_ offends,” he says. “Your FACE offends. Your fucking breath offends. Your -- your _presumption_ offends.”

You’re bored. If this piteous brother wants to commit suicide by Inquisitor, let him. But when you move your hand to your belt and he’s staring at you disgust-filled she raises one hand, one bony hand, like she can stop you in your tracks. Sometimes her presumption does offend. “Then please move aside,” she says, “so that I may be in a radius that is less offensive to you.”

He does. He shunts to the side. Terezi struts ahead like they just had a nice little whoop-whoop about the weather, and as you walk down the corridors of the outer sanctum you catch her shoulder. She shakes you off hard. “You show your throat like that,” you tell her, “you fucking keep rolling over, they will bite. They will rip out your twitcher. Mirthfuls can’t abide weakness.”

“Can’t you?” she says. You both wait at the inner gate for one of the Cardinals to unlatch it, and you pass through to the inner corridors where overhead the skulls hang like baubles and the paint is bright. The blood is fresh. You are always beautystruck, but less tonight. Your partner continues, “I am so sorry for your loss.”

“I’m trying to give you _mother fucking_ counsel -- ”

“I don’t care,” says Terezi. Her voice is odd. It throws strange echo. She stalks a couple steps before you, and then waits at the threshold. The silk of the Grand Highblood’s carnivalblock lies before you. The dim shows you that her mouth is set, her oculars are hard. Her mouth is fucking iron. “That’s all there is to it! I just don’t really care. I am smelly with apathy.”

“Oh girl,” you say, “girl _girl_ GIRL, why are you staying your claw?”

“Might never made right,” she says. She looks at you like you are a puddle of vomit that took a dump on some pus. “Not even in FLARP.”

“Look at her digging in her heels. Look at her like a braybeast on a thorn. Does she really want the _HIGHER MORAL GROUND -- ”_

Terezi says, “Gamzee, I want to be _me.”_

This is said with the same simplicity she told you she was scared in. It makes you feel the same way it did at breakfast. It makes blood roil in your pan case. It makes you want to rearrange her face from sheer disgust. It is a joke of the universe -- it is a universal motherfucking _joke_ \-- that you put your hand around her brittle wrist. Feel her bones. 

“It makes me get my sadness on to see it,” you say. “Okay? He is cracking some motherfuckin’ heresy. It’s bullshit, is all. Here are we with our baller titles, here are we bumping nug and getting justly schoolfed after squirting blood like it was a _FUCKING CONDIMENT,_ and you let him get all unfunny with you _BECAUSE?”_

She sags. Her shoulders make a droop. 

“I hope you know that when you get all genuinely friendly,” she says, “it makes me want to rearrange your face, then punch you in the teats.”

That’s precious. “Answer my fucking question.”

“That’s a _little_ better,” says Terecita. Her smile runs all pallid. “Because -- I am not an honourary indigoblood! Don’t start oozing protective over me, either. That is gross. Sometimes the path of peaceful protest is just as much fun to take, Mr. Makara.”

“But -- ”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says, and she puts her hand over yours. Her claws bite into your knuckles. “I am never going to adapt. I am the most tealblooded of tealbloods. Cut my pusher open, and there will be _TEALBLOODED_ written on the inside. I can never hide that, so stop wanting me to. For one thing, it smacks of pale.”

Terezi laughs when you shake your hand away from hers, all disgust. “You change your mind like a seadweller changes clothes,” she says.

“If I ripped your pump box open,” you say, “if I _PEELED OPEN YOUR HEART,_ it would read _VILE SINNER._ It would read _FLAGRANT FUCKIN’ ARROGANT._ It would read _NO-ASS BITCH STICK.”_

She says, “I like all that,” and she waggles her eyebrows at you.

Terezi hurries down to push tentflap away and in. She disappears from view with a twitch. As you follow you have no fucking idea, no idea what so fucking ever, what the two of you are about.

  


* * *

  


“Listen to the lesson,” says the Grand Highblood.

Tonight he takes school in his circus chambers, full of smoke. Sometimes you’re in the gallery, door locked and floor bare. Shit’s uncomfortable. You end up knee-bent and sat before your old man like you’re hearing wiggler tales. Like a pic in a pupa story. The smoke gets you sleepy or the light makes you tired, so it takes effort sometimes to give him your full concentration. Ain’t like you don’t _want_ to. You prefer getting told than reading a book or getting a mother fucking lecture, but you don’t like lessons on the whole.

He says, “THEY PAID OBEISANCE TO A NOBODY.”

Tonight you’re in the tent sanctum. You ain’t neither touched your tea.

“They paid obeisance to a troll,” he says again. “WHAT MANNER OF TROLL? An ordinary troll, to look at. A wanderer. Anonymous. Not old, not young. NOT PREDATOR NOR PREY. NEITHER FISHBEAST NOR FOWLBEAST, just a young troll with a loud voice who advertised nothing.

“And there was his motherfucking appeal, children, there was his _GOD DAMN SCHTICK:_ people draw conclusions about signs. Each blood colour got its own agenda. Each symbol a cliché. BUT THIS TROLL, HE WORE NO SIGN AT ALL.”

Guess who likes lessons? Terecita. Her pointy face aglows. Behind her specs she has hunger eyes. This is her usual brand of bullshit: she will chirp “Bored!” to nine out of ten shows on the slug, but sit through fucking movie creds to see who did the hoofbeast wrangle. She listens so hard she should leak.

“Let me guess,” she says. “He talked dread heresy!”

“You’d be wrong,” says your old man. You see her sharpen. “Dull heresy. The most pedestrian of heresies. YOU THINK THE CHURCH MOWS DOWN EVERY GRUMBLER WHO TALKS DISTASTE OF THE HEMOCASTE? You think we care for muttering? It’s a whipping crime before it is a killing crime, little sister, the laws -- ain’t -- _changed.”_

“But he _did_ speak of the hemocaste, then.”

“And peace,” the Grand Highblood says. “And a dream. SAID HE GOT A VISION, NOW. Said the true Alternia was one unjudged by the sick hue of your spill. ONE RANKED BY ACTION. One where killing was unnatural crime, don’t you know? TOLD US THE KILL AND THE CULL WASN’T OUR NATURE.”

Your old man likes his cigarettes: you know that by the time he comes to the butt, lesson’s over. Lesson only goes if he lights another lung exfoliator by the nub of the old lung exfoliator, in which case you got a stay of execution. He rolls the stick between two fingers, nail stained, print worn. “Heh,” he says, “wonder what he’d think now.” 

You don’t understand his rue. 

“This peace-talking troll spoke no agenda,” he continues. “They liked that. The bleatbeasts who listen to this shit, they don’t like being told to go to war. THEY LOVE SOFT THOUGHTS WITHOUT BLOODSHED. HE TOLD THEM GENTLENESS WAS A TRUE THING. He spoke no war, but trolls are trolls are trolls; wouldn’t you know, but for him they wanted to _PICK UP THE SWORD._

“And they called him the Signless.”

The tent sanctum’s full of smoke and tea steam. For a moment, getting that name in your aurals -- _Signless_ \-- makes a shiver dance up your cord. Makes the follicles on the back of your neck stand. It’s just some bullshit word, but the contents of your digestion pouch go to snow. You feel the old man’s prickle of fear and you recognise it for what it motherfucking is. He’s doing the chucklevoodoo.

When you look sidelong at Terezi she is still. It’s had the same effect on her, except for your partner the chucklevoodoo is always worse. The scaremonger gets felt more keenly in lowbloods. She is biting the inside of her cheek so hard you can see where it pinches, all white.

“They asked this troll how to get to his paradise planet,” says the Grand Highblood. “What did he say? HE SAID, _I DON’T KNOW, I’VE NEVER FUCKING BEEN THERE._ They say, so where is it? HE SAID, _NOT HERE._ So where? This troll, he just says: _YOU MAKE IT.”_

Your box sounds scratchy when you say, “Paradise planets ain’t a new idea.”

“Paradise planets aren’t fucking fathomable,” he says, and takes a drag off his cylinder. “THE PARADISE PLANET WE PREACH AIN’T NAVIGABLE. We don’t rowd enough. WE ARE NOT WORTHY NOR HARDCORE. We do not accept the secret given to those with the eyes of their eyes open and the canals of their ears hearing. When we attain Paradise it won’t be in my time, little Makara. Perhaps it’ll be in yours.

“But it wasn’t in theirs. These poor Signless rabble thought THEY COULD MAKE HEAVEN **TANGIBLE.** ”

There is a strange look on your legislacerator’s face. It is hard as rock. It is chill as stone. It is the atheist face she made during _Executor_ massacre, like she just sucked something sour. “So they began to riot against the old order,” she says, “and you had to make an example out of him, but made a martyr out of him in the process.”

“YOU’D ASSUME WRONG.”

The shadows crack strangely as your ancestor sets down his exfoliator, picks up his tea. Shit always looks ridiculous in his hand. His fingers are careful round the tiny cup. He sips it unfrustrated, like he has all the control in the universe and some to spare, and you are in the wicked envies for that: for that you fucking yearn. “I was young, then,” he says. “The throne wasn’t seating my sorry glutes. I WAS A YOUNG TROLL NEW TO THE CHURCH. But I knew, even then, that the old Highblood’s head would be mine. THE HIGH-UPS LIKED ME, YOU MOTHERFUCKING KEN? There is a lesson for later: HAVE THE HIGH MIRTHMAKERS BE DOWN WITH YOU. My lady Redglare always said it was a matter of politic.”

You give your partner the squint. Her sniffer wrinkles. You are both chill to the fucking bone that this is going to end up another one of _those_ stories, but he puts you out your misery.

“The old Highblood -- MAY HE CHUCKLE IN THE WICKED PEACE I SENT HIM TO -- made me Inquisitor,” he says. “Sent me off to see who this rabble-rouser was. AND WHAT ROUSING HE WAS DOING OF THE RABBLE. It was still salvageable, then, he didn’t have to up and fucking die. Didn’t have to be put down. Could’ve just got his whipping and a send-off to the labour mines.”

“Deprived of freedom until the day he died,” says Terezi.

“But still with a day to die in,” is the reply. “STILL WITH A _TWITCHER IN HIS MAW._ More than he deserved, and he would have motherfucking known such. But then he made his mistake, children, then he took it THE STEP TOO FUCKING FAR.”

You’re listening now.

“He revealed himself a mutant,” says the Highblood, softly. “Smuggled out the caves. HE SHOULD NEVER HAVE EVEN BREATHED ALTERNIAN AIR, but there he was. A mutant. Cullmeat.”

You’re gladdened that it’s Terezi who says, “How?” like a hungry barkbeast. Those hairs on your nugnape are tickling again. You’re sick with a feel you can’t identify.

But all your ancestor says is, “He was off-spectrum,” and curls his cig between long fingers. Annoyed disappointment replaces that ill feeling. “It made them raise him as a hero. A SAVIOUR. A flag to fly. THEY TOOK HIS MORTAL MIEN AND THEY SAW A PROPHET THERE, when all he was was a troll. Just an ordinary troll. Just an ordinary, _NAЇVE-ASS_ **MORTAL.** ”

The cigarette is nearly out. You wonder if he will light another. The Grand Highblood seems more interested in rolling it around, blowing on the ember.

“It was his death sentence,” he says softly. “Suffer a troll, but no false idol. CAN’T HAVE A GOD RUNNING WILD. He knew that, knew it the day he showed off his blood hue. When I came for him, children, the Signless evinced no surprise. No surprise at motherfucking _ALL._ ”

You say, “What was he like?”

This makes Terezi look at you, all astonished. Didn’t expect that one. You still burn every time her mouth makes round awe at your prying, every time you do some shit an animal wouldn’t do. But the Grand Highblood just says, “Noisy.”

Now it’s Terecita who squeezes her knees. Now she drums finger, tilts pan. “The usual secular execution would have been a hanging,” she says, slowly. “They didn’t give him to the legislacerators, did they? The sentence would have been carried out by the Church. I see! You would have made it public, and horrible.”

“It was public,” says your ancestor. “AND, _OH,_ IT WAS HORRIBLE. Strapped him to the flogging jut, little sister. WE CROWNED HIS WRISTS IN BURNING IRON. We sank an arrow in his gut to watch him bleed out. We kept those shackles hot as hot. HE DIED IN MOTHERFUCKING AGONY TO THE MOTHERFUCKING AUDIENCE OF HIS OWN PEOPLE.

“After what we did to him, they called him the _Sufferer._ ”

Wouldn’t have been the first time. You know how the life of Troll Tila Tequila ended. You’ve been fed on how the false indigoblood Troll Eminem died, eschewing the Church, giving rude rise to subjugglator lies. They made him shower in boiling Faygo. The cool dim and sweet chill of the _Echo Side_ runs rainbow with paint from both the beatified and the banished, and if the latter died easy it wasn’t by design. If this Signless suffered, he would have mother fucking _suffered_ to the umpteenth power.

“You tortured him,” says your partner. “You made a lot of noise in the process.”

By lantern light your ancestor looks at Terezi. He turns a rheumy ocular toward her. He leans in, looks her right in the blind of her eye. “Little legislacerator,” he says, “Don’t you know I know what you’re _mother fucking thinking?”_

She doesn’t shiver; she never shivers. But she doesn’t speak a word.

“We put fuel on their fire that day,” he says. “I know. We poured oil. WE KILLED A SELF-ADMITTED FOOL. A harmless fucking fool. He was all fed up with war already. HE WALKED LIKE A SOLDIER SICK OF WAR, don’t you know? The Signless was tired before he even began, and he died tired, and he -- DIED -- _QUIET.”_

Seems like there’s quiet all around you, in that tent chamber.

“A troll who would stand up in the marketplace to speak of peace,” she says after a sec, “wouldn’t die quiet, I don’t think.”

He says, “You having second thoughts?”

Terezi says, “I never had first.”

The Grand Highblood smiles. His stick’s burnt down nearly to its butt, a silky ribbon of smoke the only sign of life. You’ve seen a couple of his flap furls now, and this one ain’t a threat. He smiles at her like he’s sorry, as though he’s getting his admittance on to something deplorable, each wrinkle at his mouth deep and hard and old. “Do you feel ill for him?” he says. “GOOD. No shame in that, little sister. NO MOTHER FUCKING _SHAME._ I ain’t preaching dogma here, there is no hard rule. Feel ill for him all you desire.”

That unsettles her, you can tell. Hell, it settles ill with _you._

“You’re saying you have sympathy for the cult?”

“The fuck I do,” he says. “LIKE _FUCK._ I WILL BURN EVERY TROLL WHO CARRIES SYMPATHY WITH THE CULT OF THE SUFFERER TO **ASH**. I will _bleed them out_ and paint my flagship with their HERETICAL GUTS. I will _BUTTER THEIR **BRAINS**_ OVER THE COLDEST MOON OF THE DARKEST PLANET IN THE LONELIEST PART OF SPACE. I will _remove their writ_ from HISTORY, CHILDREN, WHETHER _YOU_ MOTHERFUCKING ACCOMPLISH THIS OR NOT, I will remove their last word FROM THE LIVING AND THE **_DEAD.”_**

Shadows crowd the tent. Breath strangles in your pipes. The last ember on his cigarette dies.

“But him,” he murmurs, “he was just a troll.”

Your old man sets down the cylinder. No more steam flows from the jug. Every part of the room feels chill and breathless. He reaches out with one gnarled paw and pats it over your head, grinding hair down into your pan, and you bristle. You flinch. You’re shamed: you still don’t like it when he touches you, but something in you wants it all the time. You like what it signifies. “Lesson’s over,” he says. “Makara, you’re motherfucking dismissed. Pyrope, you come and stay behind.”

That chafes. “What the fuck -- ”

“Sir -- ”

“I got a PRIVATE WORD to put in her can,” says the Grand Highblood. “Little Makara, away with you.”

“But -- ”

“Gamzee,” says your ancestor, “FUCK OFF.”

Terezi’s flap curls like she wants to press the issue. You want to press this issue in a wedge and drive the sides together. There is nothing he has to say to her that couldn’t be said to you. There is nothing to put in her can that couldn’t be mother fucking put in yours. But once the cylinder’s finished, the feed’s over, and you’re more than up with the play about how the old man could beat you black and blue colour; so you get to your feet and you make a bow.

The last thing you hear is him all, “Come closer,” as you twitch flap aside. You, never told to come closer, nearly head back in. It takes great fortitude on your part to head back hivewards.

  


* * *

  


Your colleague cancer doesn’t come back until the little of the morning. She doesn’t come back until long after her supper’s cold and the audiovisual slug is tired out. You stick it. Too uptight with the boredom wails to sleep. Too angry. Truthfully, even if the truth sticks in your craw, too lonesome, too motherfucking scattered and too motherfucking amped to do aught but sit on your ass. You are a spill of fucking fidgets. You even consider hitting up that dork who’s always barring you from Karkat, you’re so bored. 

When she comes back, Terecita’s feet make no sound on the flooring. She stills your lips. Her skin’s sour; she stands in the doorway of the vocation atrium and stares right through you. She blanches ash. She wobbles, swaying slow from one foot to the next, and there is a smudge at her temple that wasn’t there before. You ain’t jealous of _this,_ her looking like over-boiled fecal matter.

“I’m going to bed,” she says. “Good morning, Gamzee.”

“Like fuck you are. What game are you making being playing, sis?”

You’re up. She flinches away from you. Her cane hammers at your foot when you give her a look-over, think that for a moment she’s about to chunder her guts all over the floor, find that the mark under your fingers is strange and greasy. It rubs beneath your fingers like powder. Brimful of doubt, you say: “He didn’t up and kick your bony ass for you, did he -- ”

“No!” she snaps, coming on shrewish. “No, don’t be an idiot, of course he didn’t. We just talked, that’s all. We talked.”

“What did you jaw _about?”_

Terecita gets that look on her face again that she sometimes gets, the one like she can’t focus her sniffer. Last time you saw it it was because her cartilage had been smashed in by the old man’s hand. “You know,” she says, all quiet, all strain, “I don’t think I really know.”

“Don’t work the wicked vagueries on me, sister,” you say. “I own no bullshit. I deserve no mother fucking ambiguousness.”

“I mean that I _don’t really know,_ Mr. Makara,” she says, and you wipe your fingers together again. You realise what the substance is. Cylinder ash.

You say, low-like, “Did he get all descriptive about -- about your ancestor’s butt again?”

“Gamzee,” she says painedly, “when does he _not.”_

Terezi slides out her jacket and crumples off her tie, and she lurches off to her respiteblock. Instead of putting her jacket on the hook, she lets it drop. Instead of folding up her tie, she stuffs it in a pocket. So you leave it at that, because you ain’t in your motherfucking life ever seen her untidy shit. You let sleeping barkbeasts rest.

  


* * *

  


Your quarters that morning are dim and oppressive, they smother at the touch, and you decide that evening brings better counsel than morning does. You flick the calendar to check what subjugglator sainthood day you’re celebrating, and you go down on your knees next to your recuperacoon to give thanks: _praise be to Pretzelette, who got crazy fucked up on vodka and entactogenics in an automobile,_ and only after your rowdy _whoop whoop_ do you take off your face. That’s routine, too.

When you slide into the slime, you get no shut-eye. This means you hear her when she starts to walk.

Her tread falls heavy at first. It sounds like she’s pacing up and down her respiteblock, up and down, like a cholerbear in a cage. The pauses fret. The steps fall heavier, pick up, sounding like she’s taking a few steps and then changing direction: zigging and zagging all over the block. Only after a long time do you hear the low scratch: the aural-bleeding grind, the pan-pained screech, of someone scraping against the wall with a thousand little strokes.

You don’t put on your face. You don’t wipe slime. You hike up your pants, you march right over to her unlocked door, you go inside.

She is up against the wall. Her body’s shiny with coagulated sopor. Her pants are slimed through, and so’s her binding. She writes:

BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3  


over and over.

You say, “What the _fuck?”_

This doesn’t stop her. Shoulders hunched, she keeps at it. You give a low honk of shit, but that doesn’t rouse her either. Each sweep of her chalk is slow and even, unhurried and exact. Her breath comes at the same degree as each other breath, low-sponged and deep, like she’s still asleep. Her nose is twitching. Her lids droop. She _is_ fucking asleep.

What do you do with a sleeping stiff? When you make your approach, it doesn’t stir her the slightest. She’s unbothered as fuck. You clear your pipes all noisomely and it doesn’t bother her, just keeps scritch-scratching on the wall. There is something untoward in the way it’s all laid out: in the way each letter’s the same size as the letter before it, no change. Her hair is slick and stuck to her with sweat. Her flap moves and sounds out each letter, but nothing comes out her feedhole but breath. She’s tiny and dirty and naked, she doesn’t have to be bare as the day she was hatched to be naked. Without her uniform and cane she is downright undressed. She would puke nails out all sockets before she let you see her this way. She’d shit Faygo bottles.

“Baby girl,” you demand. “Come on. WAKEY WAKEY.”

Nothing. You get out one of the horns from your sylladex, and you squeeze a couple righteous honks.

Terezi wakes up all in fit. Her shoulders shudder. She swings her head around, heaving for breath, then she gets her lurch to the wall. The chalk falls from her digits. Gobs of slime splatter on the floor. She presses her hands, up and hard and trembling, to the words, and she licks over a grubchalk outline of **_BREAK SHACKLE._**

Then she screams like a fucking siren.

She screams twice. Thrice. Her fist pressed mouthwards don’t stop her screaming. Her eyes bulge out her pan. She digs claw into the slimy meat of your forelimb but that doesn’t stop her, she just screams like her throat has fear in it and she wants to die loud. You grab and perambulate her out the room, getting a swipe for your trouble, shut the words out behind. Out of sight, out of mind. She keeps screaming like a lowblood cull queue and her pipes sound wetter and wetter, like she’s drawn blood from the back of her throat.

Day terrors don’t quell. Day visions don’t diffuse. She’s already going to fucking town on your arms, legs kicking, and when she comes back more to herself she’ll just be meaner and quicker. There’s already indigo bubbling up from your scoremarks. She has already done a god damn _NUMBER_ on you, so what you do is you take her under each arm and you manhandle her into your recuperacoon.

Your partner drops into the slime with a tacky _gloop._ She hangs over the rim with her arms a-dangle, claws a-drip, horns akimbo, and her screams die to muffle. She makes whine instead. The low harmonics of her bitching curl into the back of your pan and set your fangs on edge, and you wait for them to die down to wet snuffles.

 _Echo Side_ is kept cold as a corpse chiller. It doesn’t matter none to you -- doesn’t matter much -- when you go the other side of your cupe and you slide yourself back into the warm slime, knees all bumping up against the backs of her thighs. Her spine makes a slovenly shape across the edge. Terezi lies there like a pile of rags, like old garbage. Like old motherfucking garbage does she lie. 

She looks used up. It makes you furious, being reminded that she’s just some troll who can be broken. The sag of her shoulders destroys. You want to wrench the horns off her head until she agrees to not be junk.

“Gamzee,” she says, jaw grinding against itself. 

You don’t say a word. “Gamzee,” she says again, far-off. “The day you did the exam cull. That was the worst thing I ever made you do. I’m sorry.”

She must be high as a fucking satellite.

“I think I shall go and sleep in the ablution trap,” she says, still thick, still slow. 

“I don’t give a fuck what you do,” you say. “You think I give a fuck? You think a solitary fuck is given by any cell in my body, wicked sis? Sleep here if you want, I do not give a shit. Just quit yapping. Quit the patter.”

“Please don’t let me sleep in the same recuperacoon as you,” she says, amazed. Terecita’s mumbling into the outer mass of the cocoon, each word coming drunk. You can see the shape of every shoulder blade. You can count the bump of each silver rib, dipping down into slime. “Please.”

“I don’t give a -- ”

“I’m still in pale with you,” she says. Her shoulders make faint wobble. She never shivers. The tremble of her gets into your pan. “I can’t sleep next to you for love nor ketchup, Mr. Huckleberry.”

 _I’m still in pale with you,_ she says, all dead. Like she ever understood pale. Like she wanted to shoulder all your misdeeds like a good girl, which you used to believe, only you’ve sure as shit stopped believing that claptrap now. She never wanted to keep you quiet. She just wanted to be the hand over your fucking flap. It’s different altogether.

With great pain, she unfolds. Your girl slings one arm over the other rim of the recuperacoon. Both of you eyeball the other, her chestcage heaving in the sopor, her fingers curling and uncurling like worms.

“Pale for you,” Terezi says again. 

It makes shadows flutter in your belly. Slime smell fills your nasals, hot and sour. There she is with arms outstretched in your cupe, reeking of desperation, licking dry lips. She’s on the last fray of her civility. The very edge of her need. _The worst thing I ever made you do,_ she said. _The worst thing I ever made you do._

“Oh, God, just be my friend,” she says. “I can’t bear it any more.”

“Be chill,” you say. “You’re cane-deep in nonsensical pie. You are up to your gunnels in whipped blather. You’ll drub me in the morning, for the sin of NOT RIPPIN’ OUT YOUR TWITCH.”

“No,” she says. “No! I am -- completely -- coherent right now. I am at the peak of consciousness. I know everything I am saying, Mr. Makara, and what I am saying is -- ”

“Stop,” you say. “Quiet.”

Terezi sinks chin-deep into the slime. Her eyes are two marbles. They roll around in her sockets all scarlet and glossy. Your pusher is getting its noise on in your chest, crowding out the other slippery tangles of organ. She stares from one end like a green slime ghost. You recline from the other, and your shins brush up against the other one’s shins. 

“Sometimes I think you were pale for me too,” she says, “brother.” 

“Yeah,” you say, “which is why you kiss like you want a _god DAMNED BUCKET,_ sis.”

To that Terecita doesn’t say _no,_ doesn’t ply defense nor cry foul. This thing between you is sick. This thing has pus, and you can see it seep, both of you crowded into your cupe and legs tangled like children. It gives the distant revelation: sitting across from you, this pimple on your existence, this dread friend, is a skin sack filled with your genes. Once upon a time you were the same thing. Then you split and she split, got mixed in the grub to come out as strangers, but there’s some chance that inside your hide there dwell cancer cells of her.

“What would you know?” she says. “The only other kiss _you_ had was smooching a boy _definitively_ not thinking about buckets.”

“Fuck you, Tav ain’t got a dirty mind -- ”

“Tavros Nitram had pictures of scantily-clad fairies all over his respite block.”

You can think of no better comeback than, “Fairies don’t wear _MOTHER FUCKING CLOTHES,_ they’re MYSTICAL and shit,” which ain’t a burn that requires ointment.

Terezi kneels up in the slime like a sopor creature. She rises from the green, it all sliding off her arms, off the chest bumps that are in no way anything to write hive about. “Let me,” she says, and she starts fucking _wading toward you on all fours,_ her voice coaxes and cajoles like you’re a witness to question. “Let me try. Let me try for _real,_ Mr. Makara, who has to know?”

The air leaves your sponges all in a hurry. She is right up between your knees and leaning over, pressing sticky paws to your face. “Close your eyes,” she breathes. “Pretend I’m Karkat.”

You jam lid to lid. When her little palms glide over your cheeks, all sweet tender, when they draw down your stem to your chest careful as careful can be, you pretend she’s Karkat. You pretend she’s Karkat for about one fourth of a second. For one motherfucking fraction of a moment, you cheat on your best beloved by imagining his hands. Only one fourth: you would’ve imagined more, you make no bones of it, but her mitts are her own and they don’t touch you as his would. 

Her fingers don’t pacify. If you didn’t have control, her fingers make you want to drag her out of the cupe by the hair. If you didn’t have control you would have her gurgling slime. If you didn’t have control you would slide those unpacifying hands down your abdomen and to the stir in your pants, see how pale she fucking finds _that_ \-- 

Well, shit.

“Baby girl,” you say.

You open your eyes. Her hands are splayed over your ribs, palms flat. Her desperation is acute. She pulps anguish.

“Terezi,” you say, and you give her the cruellest lenity. You are so gentle. You could not gentle with anyone harder. “Terezi, you dumb, nasty trash, you don’t even know where pale _abides.”_

Her flap twists. There is an ugly heat to it as she fists the waist of your pants, in the rattle of her breath. You put the gun to her temple and you pulled the trigger like you fucking loved it. Her belly’s right by your thigh and sliding against, and there’s this low curl down in yours like cylinder smoke. It burns acrid. Her skin’s slippy; she is breathing out her anger in her teeth, sifting her pain through each hole, and you

MOTHERFUCKIN’

burn.

For a moment her faithless mouth looks like you should stick your hand over it. You want her to weep like a wiggler. You want her to nudge into your body, slime stuck betwixt, and that want is getting more explicable second by second. There’s an itch behind your knees and in your palms, and your gaze gets fixed on how her breath’s making tiny huffs, thorax heaving up and down. Your pants have been tight since she told you to close your eyes. You hate your life.

Terezi remembers all at once that her claws are pants-tangled in you. She removes them with a swiftness. Spell’s broke. 

“This is such a stupid conversation,” she says, haggard. She’s talking slurry. “Why do I keep on coming back to it?”

You flop over to your side and draw your knees up some, feeling tight as the skin stretched over a drum, and after a moment she curls down across from you. The sopor creeps up the sides of your recuperacoon. Her skinny back’s near touching yours, a hand’s-breadth away, and for some reason this is apocalyptically worse than her touching you.

“You’re not wearing your paint,” she mumbles, into the slime.

“No _shit.”_

“You smell,” says Terezi, “not totally as ugly as a hoofbeast’s ass.”

  


  


That’s her shill. One moment she runs hot as fire, then makes like a motherfucking iceberg. You run hot when you run hot, and cold when you run cold: you don’t swing between the two, and like as not you’re running angry more than you’re running cool. Being with her is like sticking claw into a live socket over and over and over. You’re wide awake. You have mad fidgets. You just want to -- feel her again, skin on skin. You just want to know what it’s like. She’d let you. She wants the contact just as you do, she just won’t fucking say.

So you say, “If you don’t go the fuck to sleep, I’m leaving you out in the corridor.”

“I don’t want to stay in your recuperacoon, Mr. Makara.” 

“Get your chill on, I got a moirail,” you say, sweet as bacon and jelly, “this doesn’t mean _fucking SHIT_ to me, don’t you know?”

“You’re being horrid,” she says thickly, “but whatever, I’m too tired to care.”

Terezi snuffles some to herself, flops around in the slime to get comfortable. She either sleeps or keeps still as a dead body. The heat of her reaches your spine. She pillows her cheek in her hands, eyes closed on her arrowhead face. 

When you close your eyes you try to think of what calms, which is your best friend. He’s your last thought before you sleep, which is the usual, and your first thought when you wake; but tonight your thoughts divide and conquer between her lying next to you, and how motherfucking long it takes for your bulge to settle. You weren’t this alarmed when you got like this thinking of Tav, but each time you get stiff and ready over your baby girl’s hard chest and unwelcoming hipbones it’s terminal. 

You sleep thinking anxiety thoughts, and you keep stirring yourself awake. It takes you waking up with her snuggled and drooling into the small of your back to fall into sleep deep and true. Your life is a motherfucking pit trap.

  


* * *

  


“READ FROM THE TEXT,” says the Grand Highblood.

Next evening you take feed in the gallery. The old man lets you walk around or stand as he talks, not just sit on the cold floor. Sometimes he’ll even deign to throw you a bat and tell you both to go at it, show him a move, which breaks up monotony some.

You came astir that night with no body in your recuperacoon. You scraped slime and stood in the trap as usual, put on your paint as usual, got clad and went to breakfast as usual. Terecita greeted you with cordiality, tie untied and coffee hot, the only hint that last night happened her oculars all pinched and drawn. You checked her room; there’s a big scrub stain where the chalk words were, and she won’t squeak a word about it.

Tonight, your old man creaks down in his sitpillar and hands you a palmhusk. There’s no operating system mounted on it, just a plain datafile. The datafile’s a jumbled sack of mess and dates, blocks of text that don’t go anywhere and then continue at another jumble.

You clear your pipes:

  


8724,   


they came again and this time i did not hide, for m was with me and i was less sore afraid than i was sore, and dawn was coming and all they had was an overhang and i felt obliged to give them shelter for all i did not want to speak to them, but once they were inside they begged for a listening shell so what could i do?

they said there is a war coming, i said there is always a war, they said this may be the last one, i said war never begot a peace, they said everyone was tired and i said so was i and what did they want

they want me to come and be part of it i am going to sleep i have work to do.

  


8725,   


they say mindfang has had a crisis of freedom and is following some prophecy about a matesprit who is not even hatched yet, this tells me everything i need to know about the war, they say they come as envoys, i say what a bad ship, they do not understand

  


8726,   


they are still here and soon i will ask m to make them go, none of them have learned anything what can you even learn from hearsay and storytelling if they were not there they do not know, this is why i am writing it down as i remember every word spoken as though he opened it up and burned it upon my pan case

they need the last books, i must be left alone to write them, if they are going to war they do not know there was even a lesson to learn

  


8727,   


they have insignia burned on their wrists

they are going, they wanted to clasp hands with me, i let them what does it matter, i said what is that, they showed me, they said this is proof of their devotion, they have burned the mark of his poor burned hands on theirs and they say look look.

oh my love it is wretched, they have the sign of your shackle and they burnt it in, i can barely write for disgust

m made them go as he is good at that, they took your death and burnt it on themselves who are these trolls who pretend to love you? how can i count myself as your disciple if all i wrote prompted this?

“Stop there,” says your old man.

You’re glad to. You take some wicked elixir from your sylladex and pour it down your page-parched drink chute. Terecita has chewed down one of her claws to bed and bleeding, walking around, looking distant as a mother fucking planet.

“He had his followers,” says the Grand Highblood, after a moment. “I don’t just mean the _LISTENING RABBLE,_ children. There was the nun who stole him from the birthing pools -- heh, she was a PIECE OF MOTHERFUCKING WORK, had that disease where you like to coddle wigglers. Then there was the mind slave -- DEVOTED TO HIM, HAD NO THOUGHTS OF HIS OWN -- and this kid. A greenblood girl.”

“A woman,” says Terezi. It falls from her flap like gunfire. It pops like she’s furious at the facts. “Or at least, older by the time this was written, but not _that_ much older; she’s still mixing up the past and the present tenses. Sentimentality? But she was literate. A scribe? And they were quadrants, most likely matesprits, because she mentions _M_ for _moirail_ as someone with her.”

Your old man smiles. He makes sweet teeth at her, all stained. Whenever your partner shows the force of her brainpan he gets as fucking delighted as if he’d shown the same himself. “Correct on three counts,” he says, “wrong on two. That’s sixty percent, my little sister, NOT A MOTHERFUCKING PASS MARK.”

You can tell when she gets her tense on. Her face slacks, but her thumbs quiver. “Which?”

The Grand Highblood shifts back in his chair. When he presses down a button, his intravenals bubble, sending more of whatever straight down the pipes and into his hoary veins. You’ve never asked him what’s in that shit. You figure it’s pickling him, keeping his decay alive a couple more sweeps. That, or it’s the good stuff, and he’s just high as the sky all the time he’s talking to you.

“They weren’t in the flush,” he says. “He never kept to TRADITIONAL QUADRANTS, you understand? Wouldn’t think it to eyeball him, but he was one PERVERSE MOTHERFUCKER. HE PAID NO ATTENTION TO PROPRIETY. In her he found his ash and pitch and flush; in her he found his pale.”

You try to think about one other person being ash and pitch, flush and pale; it makes not the slightest motherfucking whit of sense.

“Then _‘m’_ \-- ”

“When we took him to the jut,” says your old man, “when we filled him full of arrow and we _BURNT HIM TO A FRAZZLE,_ we had a faithful executor. We had a STRONG, SOBER TROLL to fasten cuff and nock bow. Faithful and merciless. Pitiless and qualmless. A WORTHY SERVITOR FOR THE CHURCH.”

He taps his cylinder on the faithful ashtray he carries around. This ashtray is the bottom cut out of a Faygo bottle, then bronzed. It is a piece of truly whimsical fuckery.

“But when she came forward and took evil relic from her master’s ashes, he could not loose the bow on her for pale motherfucking pity. THE MOST _UNFORTUNATE_ GODDAMN SERENDIPITY THAT EVER WAS. We exiled him after; he was of no harm to anyone, I thought, and no good for anything. He spent pariahdom with her.”

You say, “So ‘m’ _was_ for moirail.”

“With his hand on the limb? WITH HIS MITT ON THE IRONS? Like hell it was,” the Grand Highblood says, comfortably. “She could not motherfucking bear to name him anything but _murderer.”_

  


  


Terezi balances her tablet on her knees and takes the next read. She clears her throat: it sounds like a chainsaw going through its paces. 

  


8739,   


more trolls visit now i am tired from talking and tired of trolls, and tired of the war that they say is carried out under his banner although when i say how did you even learn of him they say your books, when i gave these to your followers i did not think they would be copied so but that was a foolish thing to think. i wanted them to be read so why am i unhappy

they want to blow up the cathedral in the capitol, it is just a building

  


8742,   


they say they have a prophecy of a soldier, i say well he can come if he wishes but i will be old and nothing would come of it, if you bargain with death for death you will get nothing for your trade but corpses

  


8743,   


they say their leader is going to be a good man and has powers that even the empress would not understand. poor love, you did not have any powers ununderstandable, excepting your dreams and your goodness and that you looked very nice in pants.

  


8745,   


i once asked him when it was all right to kill a troll, back when i was young and it was accepted that you would kill another troll the same way you would get caught in the rain or get stung by a ripperwasp or kiss, and he said all right to kill another troll are you fucking simple, it is never all right to kill another troll, and i said what of the empress and what of highbloods, he said if i killed her tomorrow i would still be a fucking jackass and i would be sorry.

then he said bu

“There’s nothing more on that line,” says Terezi.

Your old man merely says, “It’s a transcription. IT AIN’T MOTHERFUCKING PERFECT. Continue.”

  


8750,   


m came to me and said, will you see their leader if he comes, and i said no send him away and he said very well, and i do not know what possessed me but i said what do you think what should i be doing should i leave this misbegotten hiding place and go where they cannot find me

he said excuse me for my presumption but what would he have wanted

at first i was angry but then i said he never would have wanted another clown church with zealots in his name and he never would have wanted guerilla fighting and he never would have wanted another drop of blood shed let alone a war

and he said, but would he have g

i said y

“Another fragment,” Terezi says. “Curious!”

i said what difference would i make i am just the recorder, he said any difference you desired, i said i would not and he said you would and i said i would not and he said you would and we continued would not you would in that vein until i said this is a purrsumption i will not abide and he said i am very sorry was that a cat pun

i have told him i will not find joy in this summoner and that is where i shall leave it

i want everything to go back to being quiet, i want to go back to my book. what is a hermit but a miserable wiggler anyhow

Your old man says, “Quit there.”

Terecita leans back on both arms, tilting her pointy face up to the vaulted ceiling. She sticks out her twitcher like an overheated barkbeast. You toss her a cold one, where it whomps satisfyingly on her shinbone and makes her squall fuck-words at you. The Grand Highblood just lets out a dusty _heh_ and says, “Children.” She flips the tab on the Faygo can, drinks it down as you consider.

“So the cult ain’t legitimate,” you say. 

Your partner wipes Faygo off her flap. “What makes you say _that?”_

“They perverted it, did they fucking not? Is this not what she’s saying all motherfucking along?”

“You won’t find a Signless cultist who’ll say so,” says your old man, and he blows embers out the end of his stick. “You will not find a cultist WHO WILL GET THEIR ADMITTANCE ON TO THAT. They call her the _Disciple;_ what they don’t tell you is that after the execution of her LONG-LOST LOVER, she motherfucking abdicated. She admitted the fight’s stupidities. She advocated no bloodshed, approved no new follower.”

Terezi says, “Why did you show us this?”

“Because their cause _IS NOT RIGHTEOUS.”_

“Shouldn’t any cause a lowblood raises against a highblood be unrighteous?”

He looks at her long and clear. He gives her the kind of consideration no underpriest would want aimed their way. Terezi speaks heresy sometimes so bland and blunt that it sounds innocuous, she makes herself sound mother fucking _safe,_ but at the same time that just outlines the venom in it worse. Trapeze act. She’s going to fall.

“Little sister,” says the Grand Highblood, “I have _ALWAYS BEHELD_ the doubt on you. Little Makara, a question.”

You ready yourself. You could spit readiness.

“Is there any instance,” he says, “any instance AT ALL, when a lowblood has cause to lift finger to a highblood? Is there ANY REASON _FATHOMABLE_ that the hemocaste is not all, that we are not living in the BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE MOTHERFUCKIN’ WORLDS?”

All of you did this one back on the _Executor,_ in schoolfeeding. You stood before the Comedic Chaplain and chanted the acknowledgements, testified that the rule was blood and blood was the rule. That culling was a sanctity. It’s wiggler shit, it’s the first building block, even you could’ve fumbled this one with your sac full of pie and your brain full of fuck. Everyone knows the answer to this one is a resounding _no._

But you say, “Yes.”

Terecita gets focused. The old man doesn’t work the wicked surprise, makes no shock sound, but he turns his consider toward you. Both you and she could get culled for saying so. Could get taken pitwards for the utterance. Everyone forgets that you love a boy with dirt in his veins and were you to be faithless to him, were he to spill you for it, the rowdy prophets would just play him a power chord. 

So you say, “I believe in the motherfucking ringside sanctity of vengeance.”

Your ancestor is wry when he says, “That’s _OLD SCHOOL,_ son.”

The stick in his pincer is only half-smoked, but he stubs it out in the Faygo-bottomed ashtray. Both you and your partner sag some, both relieved and irritated -- you never leave a schoolfeed all satisfied, sometimes you go away hungrier than ever -- but he says, “You’re right.

“Trolls ain’t infallible. Anyone who tells you that DESERVES A QUICK SPLIT TO THE PIPE, and that is writ. Someone tells you that, you cull them, they’re a fucking danger. I see nuance, children. I AM NOT SOME BLIND EXARCH ALL SAYING THERE’S NEVER ANY GREY IN ALL THIS WHITE AND BLACK WE GOT GOING ON. That a lowblood never spouted truth, and that a highblood never spouted lie. If I told you that, I’d be breeding _TWO FOOLS.”_

Those big crabbed fingers drop the white end of the butt. “You may be callow,” he says, “but I got my hope that you ain’t both ENTIRELY FUCKING STUPID.”

The Grand Highblood gets up out of his chair. For someone who’s thrown you both like rag dolls across this whole gallery, then proceeded to follow at a sprint, he gets up like ain’t nobody else in the universe so creaky and craggy. Spots of indigo ooze up as he yanks out his needles, indifferent to their bite.

“Dismissed,” he says. “Get the _FUCK OUT OF HERE._ Inquisitor Pyrope, bar you, you walk me back to my block.”

At her tense mitts, you expect her to say no. You’re of a mind to say, _what the fuck,_ all this secrecy and you’re not involved, but she simply sets her jawbone and says, “Yes, sir,” with readiness.

You wax resent. You wane doubt. Your partner gets up and she brushes herself off, and she turns and gives you this sarcastic salute. 

The last thing you hear is him all, “Two steps behind, LET’S WALK THIS FORMAL. Inquisitors get two steps to the left,” all cute and working the schoolfeed, and even from the way she looked last morning you feel resent beat doubt. This is stupid. You’re beginning to think you wouldn’t trade places, with whatever goes on in those dark blocks.

  


* * *

  


You don’t bother laying out her dinner. You stick it in the heat crate and eat yours on the couch, watching some piece of movie horseshit that your best beloved might like. You’ve tried to get through to him like a thousand motherfucking times, but you’ve had your eyes filled with an unending shit-stream of:

TA: kk’2 not here.

and:

TA: 2tiill not here.

and finally:

TA: ju2t accept you’re 2hiit out of luck toniight and FUCK OFF.  
TC: i promise, brother.  
TC: ONE DAY I WILL DO SOMETHING FUCKING HORRIBLE TO YOU.  
TA: what, liike tell me more about your love liife??

It’s earlier than you expected when the atrium door opens and in lurches your legislacerator, tired-eyed and wan-mouthed. This time she forces herself forward and skins off her coat, jams it haphazard on a hook and half-strangles herself on her tie. Terezi wobbles away into her respiteblock, and you figure that might be the last you see of her till evening.

But she comes out ten minutes later in her civvies and a scrubbed face, glasses gone. Even with a washed mask her lips are greyish and her face is pinched. She don’t bother with the meal in the crate. She sits down on the couch like she’s old as your old man, and she clutches up a mug of steaming coffee. You crank the audiovisual slug to fleet news, and both of you sit there with empty flaps.

Once she’s got some coffee in her she comes back, some. 

“We read books,” she says, without being asked. “We just talk.”

“Talk, she says. _Talk_ like you’re at a tea party, am I motherfucking correct? What the fuck _about?”_

Terecita doesn’t answer.

“Keep your secrets,” you say. “I AIN’T BEGRUDGING YOU A ZIPPED FUCKING FLAP.”

“Yes, you are!”

“I motherfuckin’ _ain’t,_ if it’s Church business you’re getting all up on then it’s Church business -- ”

“Oh, to _hell_ with Church business,” she says. “Stop getting sniffy with me, Church business is all stupid. I just want to watch some television. The only thing I want to Inquisit is the Killing Channel. Is that too much to ask?”

Both of you sit there getting your dudgeon on. This is a new usual. Even without mystery visits, she’s gone from being all smiles to being one dour motherfucker. _Echo Side_ doesn’t tickle her funnybone. Being amongst comedic imperative means she’s serious as shit, all of a sudden, like it’s a fucking defiance. Smiles seldom, or not out of pleasure. Laughs less. You feel weird about it, only then you recall that this was _your_ mien aboard _Executor._

Little by little she slurps at her caffeine, and you watch some programs nobody ever gave a shit about, and somehow she ends up with the mug on the sideboard and jammed into your side. She’s cold, though the room ain’t over-frigid. Her toes are teal. Her caps quiver. Eventually she makes like a glacier and does a slow slide to collapse forwards over your lap, hip jammed into your thigh as she watches the slug sideways.

You just fucking give up. Your arms get rested on her skinny back, skinnier in her black shirt polycloth. Most of what the slug gets set to is religious programming, so you both kind of stare at _Diners, Cullpits And Dives_ as she flops over your knees. It’s testament to how skinny her rear end is that you don’t even consider how one arm’s square on her ass. Your hand’s already at her glutes, and who gives one single speck of shit, really, so you rest your palm heavy on it and wait to see if she has a reaction.

She doesn’t. She just huddles up, siphoning the warm, and you let your paw press down some. Turns out baby girl has an ass like an iceberg. Most of it don’t show. It's softer than you thought it would be even if you swear you never got deep thought on about her ass, but it's not bad. The skin's warm. The meat's firm. 

You expect her to point out how you're getting personal with her posterior, but Terecita just lies there all limp with one cheek pressed into the cushion. Somehow your fingers are all awkwardly stroking, and she doesn't say shit, and you trace up to her tailbone and then down and around through her pants. Her eyes are half-closed. She ain't asleep. When you squeeze down she doesn't say a mother fucking _WORD,_ just shifts her hips a little.

What the fuck are you doing? You don't know. You're irritated. You are working wicked recklessness. There's a little divot at the bottom of her spine bar, where each vertebrae makes a lump all the way up to her stem, and her shirt rides up so you can see a slash of grey skin. You don't see why she's cold. Her epidermals are warm as warm. You touch that space of naked, find the waistband of her undergear, put your thumb all along where the band meets her body.

Terezi is staring at the slug screen like _Minute To Cull_ It is a fucking fascination. You get your hand slowly down in between her slumber pants and her gear, so her skin and your hand's separated by a thin skin of fiber only, and she lets out this long, long breath, and you realise that you're all up and holding yours and you're baring teeth and you're het up with touching her.

She shifts, pushes up on her arms. Now she'll probably backhand you and you're fucking ready, you fucking want her to, but she's just awkwardly moving skinny knee and shoving and then resting on your thighs again, face pressed into her arms. She pushed her pants down. She pushed her _pants down._ The waist is all hitched to her thighs. You have a front seat to her boring god damn underwear, regulation black, and the rounded bumps of her butt, and you're pretty sure that at some point knockout gas got filtered into the atrium and this is you hallucinating like a motherfucker.

“I don't know what he said," she says, into the crook of her arm.

“What?"

“I don't know,” she repeats again, dogged, “what he said. I know we read books together, but it is like I can’t remember what’s in them once I'm out that room. The more I try to remember, Mr. Huckleberry, the less I _do.”_

You get your hand on her ass again. You touch the skin high on her thigh before it goes into the gradual curve of her glutes, and the cutaneous skin there's all soft. You keep on having to get more spit into your trap, wet your dry twitcher. This is the weirdest conversation you have ever fucking had in your entire fucking life.

“You don't need to make blandishment,” you say. "If you're talking, then you're god damn TALKING -- "

“If I was talking I would tell you about it, and I would gloat all I wanted! I'm worried that I'm cracking up!"

From this angle her shirt has ridden up on her chestcage. You can see the faint pale marks of the whoop-ass she got on the _Executor;_ it never really healed. You keep looking at that, and then you look down at her thin thighs getting their press on together, then her butt. 

“You're on a ship leaking chucklevoodoo,” you say, “you're basted in the ROUGHEST SNIGGER SHADOWS that anyone could ever ask for, and you're all surprised you see shit that isn't real?”

“Do you really think that?”

You don't answer. You don't care to. You instead get your thumb down to where fabric meets thigh, pressing it up a little higher, and Terezi gives off a surprised grunt. You're filled with the sudden idea that, if you wanted to, she'd probably let you hike her underwear down, and you don't even know what to think about that. You don't process. Your pan blanks. In the background the slug blares, all white light square in the dim block, and you fold her waistband down over itself.

"I am going to stay up today," she says.

"That's a motherfucking stupidity."

"It's better than the alternative. Do you have any _better_ ideas, douchebag?"

"Tie your hands to the GOD DAMNED CUPE," you say, "put tacks on your floor, what the hell do I care?"

You touch her butt again. This time she grumbles and wiggles and fidgets, and you snap the waistband of her underpants down on her skin. Baby girl lets out a long, sharp hiss through the front of her fangs, and you squeeze a little harder and prod a little meaner. Her face is hidden up in the cradle of her elbows, but you see the way her shoulders get stiff.

Terezi says lowly, "When was the last time you hit me?"

This is a tough one to answer. The last time you belted her, really belted her to your satisfaction, was back on the _Executor._ For some reason this question's also more naked than her perched ass-up on your lap getting her butt examined, it hangs heavy between you like a secret. You are both completely fucked up beyond all comprehension.

"Before trial," you say.

"It's late, Mr. Grape Faygo. You should go to sleep."

This is a non-sequitur. This is befuddling. Terezi doesn't move an inch, just lies there with her pants around her knees and her hair in disarray. Sometimes you think she’s close to pretty. Now is one of those times, and it doesn’t make you want to be sweet on her, it slides hot needle into your socket jelly and bursts through to your brain. 

You say, “I need you to tell me what you motherfucking up and _want_ from me.”

For a moment her shoulders shake. You are motherfucking alarmed. Then you realise she is laughing, high and wheezy, sounding like a whistle. “Oh,” she says, once she’s able, “what kind of question is _that?”_

The girl is a dissembler. Your partner says, “The truth is far stupider than you’d think,” and you slide your hand off her posterior, up to the small of her back. The curve above where her filtration sacs are kept deep below, coiled up in the rest of her offal. She says, “The truth is, you dreadful douche -- my thinkpan -- ” but stops when your fingertips brush the lower shiny line of her scars, the switch marks, and she gives this high sound like a singbeast. All fluting. All tremulous.

It’s hard for you to make talk now. You’re embarrassed when all your pipes do is rasp: “Ain’t like you to be passive.”

Terezi says, almost wry, “This is the worst thing I have ever said in my life, but I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”

It hits _you_ right in the gut. Your belly ignites. She could have taken out the soft ropes of your intestinal tunnel and hanged you with them, with those words as gallows. You push your fingers up further her spine, some -- she ain’t wearing a heft satchel -- and she says, “There,” voice like a club thud. 

You spread your digits out over her skinny back. The scars wrinkle under your palm. Your girl makes a thin trill of a noise, agonized, and when you cock back and crack your hand down on her she screams. It’s the only one you draw out of her. A second time, a third, she just makes breath puff from her oxygen sponges. You whip her nine full times with the flat of your mitt, and each time her body twists, she flinches, she curls each and every toe up into the balls of her motherfucking feet.

There’s an ugly teal flush on her back. You draw her shirt down over it, and you don’t feel shit. Your pan’s white noise. Your thoughts are fuzz. This lets you slide your fingers down into the back of her underwear again, daring to go further and touch skin right on skin. She is a soft girl, for all her bones. Her epidermals are soft as overwashed laundry. You remove your hand and give her one last crack on her ass, and you make that one vindictive.

For a moment Terezi leans her frontpan down and makes no sound. Then she reaches behind her and wiggles up her pants, rolls off your lap sharpish, stands taller than you’d expected with the force you put into that last whack. She squares herself all dignified, but there’s a tremble to her, and you loathe the fact that there’s a matching fidget in your fingers and a gawk to your face. This shit’s embarrassing, don’t you know?

She says, “Thank you,” and, “I’m going to go study. I’ll come back for my grubmeal later if I want it, you probably picked out all the worms -- ”

You jerk down her hand. The bones in her wrist are thin. Her wrist is fucking feeble. Impulsively, you reach up to kiss her, and impulsively she leans down to kiss you. It’s all matter of motherfucking impulse. It sure as fuck isn’t a matter of thinking straight. Terecita kisses you hardscrabble, desperate, and you frill her flap with your teeth, press on in her mouth.

When you both part you think that maybe this is it, you’re standing on the edge of a canyon. The canyon’s filled with fire and burning. The canyon is all fail reek. The canyon is filled with fuck-up and smoke. But she steps back and she says, “Good morning, Gamzee,” and then Terezi limps off to her block.

You watch the slug for the next ten minutes for unknown reasons. You’re a fool. You are an undone wiggler. You clatter it off and then you do what you should’ve done fifteen minutes before, which is to go into the ablution block and make a mess in the trap, hoping she hears running water the whole goddamned time and knows the goddamned reason. You hope she’s in there later. You hope she does herself a motherfucking injury.

You have no fucking idea, no idea what so _FUCKING EVER,_ what the two of you are about.

  


* * *

  


The next evening seems like it ought to be every other evening that passes. You roll out your sopor. You take the spray. You shed slime, scrub paste, towel off. You make paint. The first thing you notice is how you don’t smell her, or the herbal pus she uses in the trap: you confirm suspicions when you go out into the rec atrium and she ain’t even there. No untied tie. No cup of steam.

Your breakfast is just inside the doorway, having been left there by the priest. Shit’s just as untouched. When you go to her block you’re not remotely motherfucking sure what you’ll find there, aren’t even certain, but what you do find doesn’t surprise.

Over each inch of each wall is chalked:

BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3 BR34K SH4CKL3  


She’s asleep. One of her hands is cuffed to her cupe. You surmise it did precisely jack shit. You call her name a couple, strident, and you give her recuperacoon a sloshy kick, but damned if she even rouses. For a moment you’re convinced she’s upped and fucking made a corpse of herself, but when you look close her skinny-ass shoulders heave gently up and down, up and down, so even if she’s comatose she’s alive with it.

You eat your breakfast and part of hers, hoping at any moment you’ll hear the bangs and cusses meaning she’s woken up late and is in a motherfucking panic. Nothing. So you do what any troll would do. You leave her, and you finish her grubmeal.

“She’s indisposed,” you tell the old man.

Even if you’re safe aboard the _Echo Side,_ you don’t say _sick._ A sick troll’s like for the chop shop if it looks bad enough and incurable otherwise, and even if it doesn’t look so bad nor incurable you don’t say _sick._ You passed the tent flap alone, sat yourself down at table without her by your side. She’s been nailed through your palm so long, that being unyoked to your noose ain’t immediately tolerable.

But the Grand Highblood takes it with calm. He takes it with ease. “Indisposed?” he says.

“She ain’t been sleeping.”

He just says, “That’s a GOD DAMNED _SHAME,”_ and sets to lighting his cigarette. Sometimes the smoke smells sweet to you; othertimes thick and noxious. You’ve never been tempted. As you’ve said before, you are straight-edge as fuck, you go down no path that leads to chemical ecstasy. You’ll bring your own ecstasy to the fray.

“A shame,” he says again. “CAN’T GIVE LESSONS LIKE THAT.”

“Bullshit,” you say, stung. “Teach me. I’ll pass it on to her, won’t I just? I GOT A PRODIGIOUS MEMORY, sir.”

“Little Makara, I don’t _SCHOOL ONE_ without their other.”

Goddamnit. This is the first you’ve been left alone with him since the shuttle, and you’re so fucking hungry -- you’re so fucking _empty_ \-- to have him speak to you. It’s not even that you’re not inured to lessons with Pyrope. You are. You accede. Lessons with Terezi are better than a sharp stick to the eye. But he’s your ancestor, and sometimes you want to get schoolfed on _that._

You know you sound ungracious as fuck when you say, “You want me to go?”

“Little Makara, did you hear me make that motherfucking utterance?”

Hope flickers. He says, “Let’s chew the fat and break the bone, you and me. Pour some tea, Inquisitor.”

When you’re settled with a mug of Faygo steam and he’s got one too, and Terezi’s cup stands empty, he settles his hulk back. The old man always takes pains to make himself comfortable, like his skeleton grinds against itself. He reads your fucking mind, because he says: “Feeling my MOTHERFUCKING AGE TODAY. I have been alive for many a long sweep. Not that this means they do the disservice of waiting for me to die; I got trolls all over our flock who try to kill me. THAT’S RESPECT. That’s family for you. I pull all their spines out their mother fucking throats for ‘em.”

You say with feeling, “They’re fucking fools.”

“Good descendant,” says the Grand Highblood. “BEST CHILD. I like you better than some do theirs; I told the Empress that she should’ve GIVEN HERS SIX GOD DAMN _HOLES_ IN HER MISERABLE HIDE, but she has not inclined to listen. But mine, I see promise in both.”

You’re too busy steaming again at _both._ You ain’t some wiggler, snatching and grabbing at stuff that isn’t yours; but it seems like everything in your life comes back to Terezi, Terezi, Terezi, seems like even _you_ come back to Terezi, Terezi, Terezi, and you want what’s yours by right. You say, “She has no Church promise.”

He says comfortably, “I know that.”

“She hates and fears indigo,” you say. “She hates and motherfucking _fears_. Her and I, we ain’t bosom buddies, or -- she ain’t the legislacerator I would’ve picked for me, she worships law and no other. _Echo Side_ gives her the wilts. She got airs above her station, she’s a patronising stick. And she’s a persnicket -- ”

You sound like a fucking child. There’s a hole in your pan. Rot comes out the crack. You mewling wiggler, what’s your defect? 

“She is so unhappy she is like to die of it,” your flap squeaks, without much input from you. “Why make her do the Inquisition gig? Give me a team of priests and I’ll head it up, and she can go be unhappy all she _MOTHER FUCKIN’ WANTS,_ she won’t be able to blame me.”

You wonder how bored you’d get, without her. It don’t sit easy. You’d have to troll her daylights out. 

“You’ll make a good Inquisitor, Makara,” says the Grand Highblood, like he hasn’t listened. “You got the _FIRE_ IN YOU. You got the poison. You are sick to your very soul with it. I see a Messiah. But if you want to be the troll who cut a whole tumour out the Alternian race, then you won’t just need the fire and the sickness. No, NOR THE CUNNING, though you’re clever enough.”

With his long fingers he pulls out his weed and the smoking paper. Your old man rests them on the table. You never rolled one in your life, but you’ve watched it done enough to be able to not make a whole barkbeast’s breakfast out of the thing. You pack the cig and wrap it up carefully, and you give it to him to light. He never offers it to you or your partner ever, which is good, because you’d both have to make the shame of abstaining.

The tent sanctum is dark except for the light-globes. On the floor the spiral paint still looks wet, though you know it must’ve been laid down a while back. The light that flickers on the end of the cylinder is old orange, same as the First Laughsassin’s eye jelly, and he takes another moment to speak.

“You’ll need to run ‘em down,” he says, “should they go to the _EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE.”_

“I will.”

“You’ll need to chase them when it looks as though they’re dead six times over.”

“I fucking _will.”_

“Never to waver,” he says, “never to falter,” and when you round your flap out in irritation he says, “Quiet. YOU GOT THE CONVICTION, MAKARA. But you’re young. You’ll get complacent when you think the wetwork’s over. I ain’t making the SAME MISTAKE **THRICE.** It’s a troll like Pyrope who’ll go on when you’re exhausted and Pyrope who’ll sniff out the crime for your hands to destroy, and it’s Pyrope who’ll put you on the MOTHER FUCKING THRONE even if she desires not the honour.”

In your silence he says, a little irascible, “Heir and _successor,_ wiggler, if you tell me you AIN’T THOUGHT OF IT then I will call lie.”

Getting honest, you hadn’t. Even if the old man looks like a perambulating skeleton, it seemed to you like he’d never die. That to think of him perishing would be a sin, that to be an Inquisitor was the sum of all desire. Another thousand sweeps, for him and you. Even if it was a bullshit thing to think and a horseshit thing to consider.

“Of course,” he says lightly, “this presupposes you could cut me down, DOES IT MOTHERFUCKING NOT?”

It motherfucking does, and you’re not motherfucking sure. Of all the dull-nugged people in the universe, of all the tiresome assholes and the noisome squalling of idiots, you don’t want to rid it of the one great troll who’s interesting. The one troll who can help you understand _you_ in a way even your best beloved cannot. You’re not sure, for all your surety about the way you’re growing and the way your club hand’s itching, that you could cut him down yet. You wouldn’t want to.

But you remember how he looked when you said you hadn’t wanted to spill his hue, so you say, “Give me a sweep,” and the old man laughs. His chuckle spent its life at the bottom of a rusted motherfucking pipe.

Both of you take a couple swigs of tea. Today’s brew is mixed up out of redpop. While you’re both getting your sip on, he says, “You got acquaintances outside this ship?”

“Yeah -- ”

“You ever MOTHERFUCKING CONVERSE with them?”

If you sipped your tea, that’d be a sign of a fucking stall. If you looked at him like you were an idiot, he’ll think you’re a fucking stall or an idiot or both. You don’t know why your pan’s in such a panic about this. There’s some sense left in your skullcase when it comes to Karkat, that hiding is all, and that’s why you say “Terezi does,” without missing a beat.

And all the Grand Highblood says is, “Hm.”

It ain’t strict truth, but it ain’t strict lie. 

If he was going to ask more you’ll never have the knowing of it, because at that moment Terezi pushes apart the tent flap and comes inside. She looks like haggard dribble shit. Her eyes have sag and shadow. Her hands are still shaking some. Her uniform’s neat and nice as ever, but everything else about her looks limp and fucking piteous. She salutes the old man crisply and says, “Sir, I apologise for my most egregious tardiness!”

“Makara said you were indisposed,” he says, flicking ash.

Because it’s redpop tea, she settles herself down at the table and knocks a cup back immediately, after you deign to pour. Then she holds it out for another. There’s a quiver in her shoulders. “If Mr. Makara found me indisposed, then _Mr. Makara_ should’ve woken me.”

“Fuck off. You didn’t wake.”

“Redglare used to work, work, work until WELL AFTER THE BENIGHTED HOUR OF NOON,” says the Grand Highblood, obviously enjoying himself. “It seemed a GOD DAMNED _CRUELTY_ to go into her cloister and stir her up early, but she’d have no other -- ”

“Sir,” your partner dares to interrupt, and thank _fuck_ she does, “did I miss any work?”

“No, but both of you MOTHERFUCKING **ATTEND** TO ME NOW.”

Your old man takes a long puff of his cylinder, and then he lets it rest down in his Faygo-bottle ashtray. His intravenal machines clang together like chimes. “I’ll teach you one thing today,” he says, “and one thing only. After that the lessons you have will be a DIFFERENT BRAND OF LESSON ALTOGETHER. You’ll have an altogether different brand of motherfucking schoolfeed, children.

“In these lessons I’ll expect nothing from you but COMPLETE MOTHERFUCKING SUCCESS. Do you understand, Inquisitors? You aren’t fucking wigglers any more, and I DON’T -- FUCKING -- _CODDLE.”_

The room goes darker and colder. The expression on his face goes from genial to skull. Nobody gets as deadly serious as the Grand Highblood; you feel your spine standing straighter, see Terezi grip her hands together to keep them still. You can’t take your face off him, and you feel the first drip of fear gather at the nape of your stem.

“Tonight I teach you the sign of the cult,” he says.

With one ropy arm, he snags the teapot and sweeps the rest of the table clear. Cups shatter with a crash off the side. The pot he sets off to the side. “The more foolish -- OR DEVOTED, MIND -- burn it into their flesh, but that type’s long since died,” he says. “It used to make it easy. No matter. The faithful foolish wear it more usually around their necks, beneath their garments. IT’S A MOTHERFUCKING MYSTERY THAT THEY WEAR IT AT ALL.”

The Grand Highblood seizes Terezi’s hand, this time. With his old mitt and a long claw, he slices a clean line up her palm and down it. She flinches, but don’t make a sound otherwise. Her blood spurts out the rude salt-sea hue it always spurts, and with her blood he begins to draw on the table right in front of you, oculars fixed to his clawtip in a daze.

It takes two movements only, mirroring each other: a long swoop and a curlicue, and a curlicue and a long swoop. Both halves nestle into each other, shiny and teal.

  


  


  


It feels familiar to you. You ain’t sure why. It hurts something in the back of your pan, like a discordant word.

Terezi is licking her wounds all meditative, and drops of blood dribble down her wrist. You remember the journal texts. You recognise the sign for what it is. It’s the manacles they burnt him alive in, which is a morbid motherfucking joke. That doesn’t really satisfy your niggle none. 

“The penalty of wearing this sign is death,” says your old man. “The penalty of making this sign is death. THE PENALTY OF WRITING THIS SIGN IS DEATH.”

Your partner leans over the table and gives the sign another good, long sniff. “There must be some leniency there, sir,” she says, “as it would be awful if you got arrested.”

The Grand Highblood gives her a long look of consideration. For a moment you think he’s going to reach out and backhand her, give her a fucking wallop once and for all -- but then he busts out in that saw-edged, rust-raw cackle again, and she smiles winsomely. You notice she never makes ease with her shoulders. 

“Not for these purposes,” he tells her. “ONCE A LEGISLACERATOR, ALWAYS A LEGISLACERATOR, am I correct? But mark me, YOU FUCKING MARK ME: if they know this sign, you have them. If they make this sign, you have them. By this sign you’ll know them, and even if they won’t BEAR THEIR LOWLY WITNESS to being one of his cult they may still show you their heinous symbol. And that’s all you’ll need.” 

“All you’ll need,” you say, “for motherfucking WHAT?”

“To snuff ‘em out. Both of you copy it, now. Don’t stop until I GIVE THE GODDAMNED EDICT.”

There’s no flimsy, no tablet, no ink. Terezi hesitates only a moment before leaning over and breathing in the symbol again, and you’re biting open the heel of your paw until you spurt indigo all over your wrist. At the edge of the table you trace the symbol in the same spot, layering it over in your flaking blood with a fingertip for to paint with. Both of you copy until the symbol loses all meaning. Looks like two corpses huddled close. Looks like two lopsided eyes. If you knew the sign, that knowing is going and motherfucking gone.

When you sneak glance at your pocket parasite, her hand’s stained with blood and so’s her mouth. Occasionally she’ll tilt her head down and re-wet the blood so she’s got more of it, and if your old man wasn’t there with his expression hard and cold you would’ve made a joke about fingerpaints, or -- something -- anything to smash your fist down into the claustrophobic silence and the _skritch, skritch, skritch_ of your claws. 

“Stop.”

The old man stubs out his cig even if there’s a full third left, and you watch it smoulder at the bottom of the tray. He rises to stand and makes his intravenals jangle all at once, and he takes the pot and pours it over the table. Cooling tea puddles over the three sets of symbols and muddies the blood, drips over the side in thin red, smears all beyond repair.

Both of you rise to stand, as is the edict of the burnt-out cig. Both of you bow. When you turn around and walk away you’re still seeing the two curlicues over and over at the front of your mind, like two holes and a broken piece of circle, and that’s why you almost don’t hear: 

“Inquisitor Pyrope, you stay behind a moment.”

You realise: you are so motherfucking _sick of this,_ but it’s not the same as your initial nausea. It’s not for jealousy you’re bored of this song-and-dance. And your flap says: “Sir.”

“You’re dismissed, little Makara.”

“Sir,” you say, amazed that your mouth’s making such a sound, “sir, I don’t motherfucking think -- ”

“Gamzee,” she says beside you, under her breath, “don’t you _dare_ start sounding like Tavros over me.”

She knows how to rile. “Fuck you. Die on your own motherfucking mountain, then.”

For a moment you think about planting your feet down and getting adamant, get salty with your old man for the first time it really fucking mattered, but you don’t. What would you say? Why rescue Terecita if she doesn’t want to be rescued? She just pivots around in the direction of the table and the cooling puddle of Faygo tea, and she walks away from you.

You could stay. But that’s a plan that’s got no guile in it.

When you push aside the flap, you don’t close it. You walk away into the darkness of the corridor. You make each step a squeak. You march down the corridor hung with baubles and bone. You make each footfall count. Then you stop and you count to fifty, then you count backwards from fifty, and then you spell Karkat’s name forwards and backwards and you decide that’s time enough; you sneak back on noiseless paws, and you dare close enough to stand at the square of light the entrance throws out. The light has dimmed considerably.

Terezi’s facing you. Her flap hangs slack. The old man’s risen from the table and abandoned his needles. What he’s whistling through his chucklebox at her is so soft you can’t hear it; she stands tall and tense as a steel bar. He is speaking to her so quiet. He is speaking to her so gentle. The Grand Highblood’s massive paws come down on her shoulders, come down on her arms, and she doesn’t even flinch: this is because -- as motherfucking evidenced by the chill in your gut and the pain in your bones, the fear smearing your palms with sweat -- there are some serious chucklevoodoos going on in that room.

His yellowed claws come around to her throatstem. They slide down to her collar. They pry aside the top button, and all the while he whispers to her, weary, of things you strain to hear.

  


  


His fingers get their search on for things they can’t find. They press over her collarbones, at the top of her chestbone. None of it is in any way untoward, you understand, there is no motherfucking caress in it to be had. Your old man’s patting her down. There’s no comprehension to it. After a while, he turns her around in his arms, and he lays the gentlest little _swak_ of a kiss on her skull.

At that point you would’ve gone in there. You would have demanded explanation. You would’ve hollered. But then the old man looks right up through the flap at you, and every drop of water in your body turns to piss and ice.

You can’t move. The fear in that room is beyond all fear you’ve ever produced or partaken, even previous jaunts with him being up in your grill. Your pusher stops in your chest and a great pain settles there instead, and you’d wet your britches if you had control enough to. His ocular sockets are great black pits. His face is a skull in a skin mask. You were wrong to name his fear the fear to stay alive; you don’t want to fall to your caps and pledge fealty to him, you want to crawl on your belly and weep in apology that you ever got hatched, beg him to put the whole world down rather than suffer.

The Grand Highblood pats Terezi’s hair smooth. He takes her shoulders, and he pushes her toward you. She makes no stumble. She commits no falter. She buttons up her coat as she walks, and she walks like a wind-up wiggler toy. When she reaches the entrance to the tent, every light within it goes out behind her, and it’s then that you break.

The dark’s too much. You grab her and run, push-and-pull her to the gate as her legs refuse to run, hammer it until the keeper comes to unlatch the exit to the inner sanctum. You push past and you take your legislacerator, and you don’t stop motherfucking running until you’re on the other side of the ship.

Even this far away from the circus sanctum, you’re still somehow convinced he’s going to come after you: for no other reason than fear, for no other logic than the primal part of your thinkpan. Have you even committed sin? You push into a corridor past a thin sheeting of bottlecaps and fingernails, and from there you bolt into the first doorway you find. You smack your hand down onto the recognition hornet, Terezi limp under your arm, and you don’t even feel the prick as its stinger takes your hue. 

When the doors open, you lock ‘em behind you. You’re aware of vast empty. You take a couple runs into that gnawing dark, and you keep going mindless until you stumble hard over a step. In the fear your oculars don’t adjust. What your fleshsack does is keep going until you budge up against something structural, and you drop your baggage down on it like a grubmeat dummy. You squat in the shadows before her. Of how long you crouch there, arms over your head, you got no notion. You just sit there until your squish biscuit’s finally

fucking

STILL.

You rock back and forth on the balls of your feet. You weep, some. Bit by bit the chucklevoodoo leaves you, so your pusher beats regular and your shakes aren’t so bad, but if someone had broke in with a tub of sopor you would have shotgunned it all. You would’ve taken any drug they have name for. You’re weak as all hell. You’re weak and furious -- what did you do that for, what the fuck did you even go and have to _do_ that for -- and you’re furious because you fucking did it for her, and no good did it even do.

After a while, the lights come on. They shine soft on the floor, showing slick glass. They reflect off black wall and old blood. They flick on all the way to the center of that chamber where you hunch, and you realise that you just laid your legislacerator on the holy throne of the Mirthful Church. She is crumpled up in the piece of most bitchtits furniture where generation upon generation of First Laughsassins have sat their asses, and you’re hunched before it with no thought in your head but fear thought. 

You put her on the old man’s throne in the sacred chamber, with its fingerbone ceiling and its holy paint. It’s a motherfucking joke. 

After a while Terezi startles you by saying, quite normally: “What happened?”

Hearing her voice you’re angry at _her_ for the sin of being chucklevoodooed, no matter how stupid that is. “I just remember the symbol,” she says, into the silence. The room swallows up all your echoes. “Him calling me back, and the symbol. Highly weird.”

“Wicked sis, you ever seen that sign before?”

“No. Have you?” 

You say, “No,” but she says evenly, “Mr. Grape Faygo, I can sniff a lie.”

“It isn’t a fucking lie -- no lies leave my twitcher. If I saw it,” you amend, “I don’t know where.”

Both of you lapse back into silence. You sense her shift behind you, flex her fingers, rotate her jaw. The dais beneath you is polished so high you can see your reflection in it, paint a little smeared with sweat, eyes burnt orange from the duct malfunction. Grimy purple streaks down your cheeks. Salt on your tongue. Behind you she lounges in the holiest of motherfucking sitpillars, seat so wide her toes don’t even go off the arm.

“What is the penalty for sitting in the throne of the Grand Highblood?” she asks presently.

“Motherfucking chopped into pieces with a hatchet starting with your motherfucking toes, ticket revoked from the Dark Carnival,” you say, “murals of unsightly shit painted with your effluence.”

“Then it is extremely lucky that I am _lying,_ not _sitting.”_

“Bullshit. That’s technicality.”

“Cases have been won on less.”

You’re grinding your backfangs together in the anxiety. You hunch up and you find yourself gritting out: “He chucklevoodooed us both. I came back to get eye of what was going on, on account of it being also my _mother fucking MOUNTAIN,_ wicked sister, and he was -- touching you, checking your collar.”

Terezi sits up straight on the throne, balanced on her elbows.

“Holy shit,” she says, a little dazed. “In an _untoward_ way?”

“Of course not untoward, you heretical stick, fuck would he want with _you?_ He wasn’t feeling you up for shits and giggles.”

“There are very few shits _or_ giggles to have,” she agrees. You envy her poise. You fucking loathe it. “So -- it was definitely _him_ in this entire adventure? I’ve been getting chucklevoodooed each evening?”

You’re loath to say it. You hadn’t wanted to know it was by design.

“Yeah,” you say. “You reek of the rough chuckle. You’ve been fried with the snicker.”

“Oh, thank awful dead troll God.”

What.

“I just thought I was going nuts,” says Terecita, and slumps back down. She lets out a sigh. Both of you are still shaking, some. “It was a very boring mystery. Investigation of why I am going insane is very different case than investigation of why the Grand Highblood is bothering to chucklevoodoo me. This is, as the seadweller said to their matesprit, a very different bucket of fish.”

You stare. There is a tiny smile on her mouth, one that grows into a mirthless grin at your horror. It adds teeth. It looks like a fucking cholerbear trap. “I don’t know what,” you say, “of WHAT CRAZY IS FUCKING _**WHAT**_ IN YOU.”

“Mr. Makara.” There is foul delight in her maw. “What’s this I smell? Were you really truly conflicted about picking a side? Were you actually weighing up the crime of your ancestor manipulating your partnered legislacerator?”

She’s too late to dodge as you shoot to stand, when you lean over and you tweak her honk. You twist it. Nobody could ever say you were above your petty vengeancies. Terecita gargles pain; then she reaches up with clumsy mitts and pokes two claws in your eyes, making you drop your pan back. Neither of you got fine dexterity. You’re still wan and shuddery and weak, and a little while back you wanted to throw yourself out into the airlock rather than face another couple hours of living; her chilly hands feel strange and slow, in the wake of that. 

It’s too much effort to tussle. You drop down to sit in front of her without thinking of the miraculous hatchet or your ticket to the Dark Carnival. You don’t even pang. They say that sinners who sit on the throne of the Highblood turn immediately into low-quality snort, the flesh right down to the bone, but this chair’s your hatchright. If Terezi can lie in it, _you_ can surely sit. Ain’t even feel mystical. Just chill. Just cold. 

“Maybe if you weren’t so fucking faithless in your conduct.”

“You’re not so petty as to think it’s that, douchebag,” she says, right behind you. This throne’s broad as good goddamn. Your bodies feel strange. Your skin feels indistinct. “It’s not about my rank atheism. This is a game, and I just want to know the stakes -- Gamzee, you really came back?”

_“Nobody fucks with your skull but me.”_

It blurts out your mouth. It splutters and strangles. You turn away until Terezi cups your face in her hands very gently, turns you to face her, thumbs balanced and splayed out on your throat. She is sitting up behind you. She looks blown open. She looks like concussion.

“That could be construed as tenderness,” she says hoarsely. Her palms are clammy. “Even ameliorated by curiosity, or disgust, or whatever -- how long _have_ you been having these dreadfully loyal thoughts about my skull and spine knobbles?”

Her hands are a country you’ve travelled too often. You always thought her hands had easy beauty the way the rest of her didn’t. Nimble fingers, long and deft. Perfect orange shells of clawtips. The cleft between each digit is your claimed motherfucking territory. Some trolls think of ass and glands: what do you think of? You think of her fingers.

“You know full well,” you say, “you got the _full fucking knowing_ that if this is quadrants, wicked sis, I don’t want conciliatory.”

It’s the first time you’ve let yourself say it.

“I wanted you in a collar,” she says baldly. “I wanted you to heel and roll over. I wanted you to be what -- Vriska wasn’t, you see.”

This is an apology three times in remove. You’re filled with soft contempt. “Stop all these pale pretenses,” you say. “You can leave them to rot where they motherfucking fall.”

Terezi touches your cheek. You mouth her palm. You lick the line that borders thumbpad and thumb, taste each callous. She stares blindly at your face and never stops holding it, cradling your jaw in her claws. “But they were _nice_ pale pretenses,” she says plaintively. “I would have tried so hard to be a good moirail. I would have been amazing at it.”

“Not with me.” 

“No,” she says lowly, “no, I’m beginning to suppose not.”

One of her thumbs traces the wet on your mask. It smudges paint. It worries the flesh, leaves a little scratch.

“Is this the part where you change your tune, Mr. Makara?” she says, and gives you a ghoulish grin. “Am I to be pinned to the floor as you laugh it all off? Do I get a dance done on my frail emotional state as you tell me that I’m a dipshit for having the arrogance to assume -- that the quadrant you’d want -- ”

You sift hand through her hair. You fist her horn. “You know what I told him?” you say. “I told him to send your bones packing. I told him to send you back. Set the sword even between us, sister. Sword set _even between us.”_

“He won’t -- ”

“But if he _mother fucking DID,”_ you say, and you shake her horn till she jangles, “if you got sent to the far reaches of space, you got your distance on, left my side, forgot my name, vagued my face, never motherfucking recollected -- you would still be -- ”

“Gamzee -- ”

“The WORST mother _fucking THING_ that ever _HAPPENED TO ME,”_ you say. 

Each foreclaw digs in your skin. Terezi don’t draw blood. She simply hooks her claws and lets you feel ‘em, raises her flap back in a snarl, dead eyes fixed on a spot past your snout.

“If I got the orders back to the _Executor_ I wouldn’t accept them, you goon,” she says, intent. “I am your legislacerator. I will remain your legislacerator should the Highjudge Advocate General stand me in front of a council and tell me that our partnership is dissolved. I will be your legislacerator when they stamp that red, distressingly delicious _CANCELLED_ stamp over our names.”

You give her horn another little shake. She squelches her palms down your jaw like she can crush you between them. “You really think you’ve seen my _worst?”_ she mocks you. “Oh, brother, _brother,_ little baby _BROTHER,_ I am going to take your life and crunch it up and gobble you down. I will drink your blood and boil your stupid subjugglator bones. If you want me for a kismesis then you -- ”

You’re too busy kissing her at _kismesis_ for her statement to make itself anything other than _mmph mmph mmph._ Terezi detaches claw and flings her arms round your neckstem, and both of you mack in first earnestness. You can’t stand to be with her. You can’t stand to be without. Both of you fill that cold seat with yourselves, her getting all up in your lap and then all up in your grill as you kiss her woeful mouth. Nothing with her is ever easy but this, so you’re going to get it while the going is motherfucking good.

Both of you have played at spar so many times that kissing’s like a fight, just with awkward. She keeps trying to plant her caps down, work you forward till you hit the carved stone of the throneback. You aggress. There’s a lot of saliva and a whole lot of fucking tongue, and for the first few that’s more slimy than it is miraculous, but then she quits trying to lick your teeth and smooches along your flap instead. 

“I’m not sure,” she’s panting, wide-eyed. “I’m still not sure -- ”

“Nobody’s ever _sure_ about _shit,”_ you say, “nothing’s motherfucking _sure,”_ and you coax her mouth to kiss you again.

The adrenaline from your old man’s scare is still in you. It transmutes. You are so fucking _glad_ to be alive and well and living, have liquid black coursing through your system. When you rub along her ribs she lets out startle, she squawks, then gets her mouth up in your stem and licks your throat like candy. Heh heh. You’ve been right all along. She is so into you. 

“Oh my God,” she says breathlessly. “Oh my _God._ Your paint tastes so gross.”

“Fucking what -- ”

“Bluh, blech, like hot concrete,” says Terezi, and closes her lips right up next to your pulsepoint. Her tongue flutters against your skin as she sucks down hard, once, twice, sieves your paint through her teeth. That’s hot for no reason. Everything’s hot for no reason. She’s hot for no reason at all. You like how her hair smells like her shower sludge and how her horn brushes up against your aural shell, you like how she slides hands down and over your thorax and fists in your shirt. 

This ain’t how this was meant to go. You were going to sing love first time at Tavros Nitram and offer up to your piteous brother, pledge yourself to him for anything he could think of and a whole bunch of shit you’d thought up beforehand. You two would kick back and have some hardcore make-out. You would beg to expire in his motherfucking arms. You would fucking _rap about it._

Instead you’re sitting in the throne of the Grand Highblood as a dreadful bureaucretin straddles your lap, saying thickly, “I’m acclimating,” as she scrapes paint off your stem. You pop each button off her coat. You’re getting your acclimate on too.

Somewhere along the line her tie comes untied. Your cuffs come off. Her specs get tossed. You’re all pulling her into you and urging her body into yours like you wanted to in the cupe, getting your mitts on her sitbones and the thin curve of her ass. Sometimes you’re both laughing into your kisses like they’re the best jokes you’ve ever heard and then she feigns serious again, solemn. You kiss that solemn flap. You lip her frown. You got the need to tear her to shreds, to keep kissing her stupid face, to not let go until you’re sure. 

Terecita palms your horns and forces your skull back, squeezes down until your breath comes heavy. “Gamzee,” she says, all intent of a sudden. You’re rolling your palms against her until she closes her lids and rolls back against you, lets a low grunt slip. “Gamzee, you -- you have to work with me now, really work _with_ me, if we’re -- there’s more to the Church than Echo Side and the Grand Highblood, we could get eaten alive -- ”

“ _You_ have to motherfucking _TRUST_ ME,” you say.

“We didn’t pick a _trust_ quadrant, dummy!” 

Both of you are grinding up against each other, clothes on. For a few moments you’re all about that and not graceful about it, shoving and fumbling, and when she squeezes up around your hipbones and you push hard between her legs she lets her head loll back on the armlean. Terezi makes a sound that’s less _bucket film_ and more _engine fail,_ but it gets you going anyway. “Whose dictate is that,” you pant, “whose dictate is _that_ but motherfucking _ours?”_

With a low snarl, she slides you back. She eases you ungently to lie on the carven arm of the throne, and she makes a noise like knives in a grater. Impotent. Like she's too blind to look at you enough. Terecita pushes her claws up and under your shirt and presses her head to your thorax, rooting around, going looking. Her claws examine. She mouths over your shirt until you get your hand in her hair, and as you pull she scores five lines down your motherfucking thorax. Five lines. Fine lines.

You get your hands on her caps and spread patella 'til you know it smarts, and you get your clothed bulge right between her thighs. Terecita closes her lids. A hard tremble runs right through her. When she slaps you, it ain't too hard; just enough to raise the skin and wake you up from shoving between her legs like some six-sweep kid. Both of you go teeter-totter over again until she's back up against the armlean and arching back against it, and you reflect that fucking's just a fight you both lost already, apparently.

Terezi in disarray on the throne of your ancestor is a Terezi undone. There's teal heat in her pointy face, blood at her black lips. Her coat's rucked up. She peels herself out of it until she's left just shirtsleeves, and you can't fucking stand the buttons on her shirt, you can't fucking stand the buttons at her pants. You hate how she's shaking. You hate how you're shaking. The loathing could boil a sun down into a black hole and take you with it, and not even mother fucking light would escape.

"Do you even have a pail, Mr. Makara?" she says.

Both of you come a little embarrassed at the word. It comes out her mouth with a little pop, bursts at the _p,_ slurs the rest of the way. You can't believe this shit's making you shy. You try to think of some goddamn subjugglator sensualities, something to say, and you go: "Show me your tits and I'll show you," like that's even a thing anybody would vocalise during sex.

"Rude!" says Terezi. "You first!"

You try to kiss her again, but she steadies both red-booted feet on your shoulders. She pushes heel into your shoulder til the skin grinds. What you do instead is drop your head to her chest, press your mouth against the cloth of her shirt, knowing by now she eschews the gland hoister. There's nothing between her skin and your mouth but thinnest weave. When you find her nipple it feels all pebbly and puckery, spit staining her shirt and moulding it to her, and you bite down. She lets out a sound like a stepped-on nutbeast. Her thighs are around your throatstem. That'd be one way to die. You get your twitcher all sloppy and warm on her, because to be motherfucking honest you are not an expert at this.

Terecita yanks you away wholesale. She kicks you away hard with her boots, then plants them either side of your knees. Suddenly she takes the hem of her shirt and pulls it up and over her head, wriggling out of it like a chrysalis, yanking it over her skull and popping it over her horns. Her smile is some first-grade fake bravado. You can't say your girl don't have her game face on.

“I guess I will be the gentletroll here,” she says.

  


  


Seeing her naked makes her littler, somehow. Her breath heaves her chestcage up, her small hard nutrient sacs. Her skinny-ass ribs. You could snap her in two and leave her broken here. You try to leer, but your face tastes like a goddamn grimace.

You say, "Want to know how wigglers get motherfucking made?"

"Okay, look," says Terezi, taking one of your hands and placing it on her belly. She gives you what’s obviously her intention of an erotic smirk. "I already know how wigglers are motherfucking made. Saying that just makes me think about how you and I got made, which I will remind you, was at the same time and is a sore subject! Also, I would like to remind you that I already know how wigglers are motherfucking made, because _my_ lusus was around to tell me -- "

"How could she have _left,_ your mommy was a FUCKING EGG -- "

Your legislacerator gets each knee around your ribs. She squirms up into the hard lump of your bulge. It occurs: this is really happening. You are committing the act with her. Once you'd thought this sloppy makeout would've occurred with the brown-eyed boy you love so much you want to offer your offal to him, whose flap you wanted to kiss so sweetly and motherfucking gently. She slides your hand up until you cup a breast, close your fingers all around it until the squeeze makes her sob, until her pulse panics like a dying beakbeast. Your pusher gets its hammer on until you see motes.

Both of you find a hard rub against each other that makes your pan white out. You reach down. You get her hands. You wrap each digit around your neck so she can clasp around your jugular, can feel each hard swallow in your stem. The way she regards you is like she's seen a wanted poster for God, and you know the fucking noise you make is more suited to caress.

"You gonna be my final testament," you say, "baby girl?"

"I will be your final testament, iniquitous brother," says Terezi. "I'll also -- I'll also pail you, if you shut up for five minutes!"

Her hair is filaments in your fingers. Her horns are warm in your hands. Her neck is so small. Her heart is so loud. Each bone in your body is the bone in your body, and each cell of her meat is the cell of your meat. What you two got was written before you were drops in a bucket. What you got was written on the ticket of your freakshow before the universe was rowdied into being.

You find yourself hoarsing out, "I hate you," and she just says, "I know."

  


* * *

  


A long time later you'll look back on that throne room and her heaving for breath against you, past words, past grace, and you'll try to recall everything she did and said. Each touch. Each wound. All the times she was snide and all the times she wasn’t, and how exactly you got from beginning to pail -- but it was such a mad motherfucking scramble of claw and mouth and bucket and burn. The choke and the strangle. The kiss and the backhand. What you remember best is your mouth at the first knobble of her spine, and her saying: "I hope you die and I hope I’m there," all in a daze. 

Shit was near romantic.

  


* * *

  


Later on when you stuff bucket into your sylladex and shove your sticky bodies back in your clothes, the enormity of what the fuck just happened starts to seep. It gets through your cortex. Your new kismesis says, “Oh my God, check the place for stains,” and that just sets you the fuck off. You’re done. If there’s untoward splatter on that chair, you didn’t find it on account of you were laughing too motherfucking hard. 

Part of you expects to find a host of priests outside the throneroom, carrying torches and boiling Faygo. You expect a cardinal cluster. You expect a gallows. You kind of expect to go down in the books as Gamzee Makara, turned inside out for the sin of committing carnal acts upon the high throne of the Church of Mirthful Messiahs. There’s nobody in the hallway but you, and the rest of _Echo Side_ ’s so quiet it could be empty of anyone.

“If I had to mount a defense for our case,” Terecita tells you later, “my defense would be that it was really, really funny.”

Girl’s getting pretty down with the clown.

TC: i got something to tell you.  
CG: GOOD, I’LL GO FIRST.  
CG: GAMZEE, SHIT IS GETTING PARTICULARLY REAL HERE.  
CG: THE REALNESS QUOTIENT IS BEYOND MATHEMATICAL.  
CG: TRY TO PUSH ASIDE EACH HORN-FILLED SYNAPSE FIZZLE MASQUERADING AS “THOUGHT” AND LISTEN TO ME.  
CG: DON’T CONTACT US ANY MORE UNTIL WE CONTACT YOU FIRST.  
CG: IT’S TOO DANGEROUS. BUT DON’T WORRY, I’LL KEEP IN TOUCH.  
CG: I WILL BE WITH YOU UNTIL YOUR EYE SYRUP MELTS OUT EACH CORNEA. I AM NOT GOING TO LEAVE.  
TC: fuck’s happening.  
TC: MOTHER OF FUCK IS HAPPENING, BELOVED.  
CG: IT IS IMPORTANT YOU NOT SHIT YOUR PANTS RIGHT NOW. I NEED YOU TO TELL ME MORE DETAILS ABOUT THIS INQUISITION GIG.  
TC: we talk about cult.  
TC: HE SHOWS US SHIT FROM OLD MOTHERFUCKING TEXTS, I AIN’T GOT THE KNOWING.  
TC: discuss old deads.  
TC: WE DON’T COMMIT NOT MUCH OF NOTHING.  
TC: what’s happening, best friend. Do:  
CG: YOU’RE NOT DEPLOYED ANYWHERE?  
TC: nope.  
CG: THE MOST YOU GET UP TO ABOUT THESE WILD AND WACKY “CULTS” IS READING BOOKS?  
TC: yope.  
CG: OK. OK. GOOD. STANDS TO REASON. IT’S JUST A TITLE. BUREAUCRACY IS FILLED WITH CORRUPT, PUS-FILLED CRYPTS GIVEN IMPORTANCE AND TITLE BUT NO MEANING. YOU’RE FINE. THAT’S GOOD.  
CG: YOU NEED TO TELL ME IF YOU GET SENT OFF THE SHIP, ALRIGHT? IF YOU GET PUT INTO THE LINE OF FIRE.  
TC: i ain’t dumb.  
TC: dear i ain’t dumb.  
TC: MY ONE AND MY ONLY, I AIN’T SOME DUMBSHIT YOU CAN DO THIS TO.  
TC: YOU NEED MY HELP AND I WILL MOTHERFUCKING COME AT A RUN.  
TC: KEEP YOUR MOTHERFUCKING DOOR OPEN.  
TC: I’LL COME.  
CG: I’M OK.  
CG: I’M FINE.  
CG: I AM FUCKING FINE. MORE TO THE POINT, YOU’RE FUCKING FINE. YOU NEED TO TELL ME THE MOMENT YOU GET SENT ANYWHERE. YOU’LL LEAVE A CODE IN SOLLUX’S PESTER.  
CG: THE CODE IS  
CG: UHHHH, FUCK.  
CG: THE CODE IS YOU SAYING THAT YOU AND TEREZI JUST WATCHED THE LATEST TROLL MATT MCCONAUGHEY FILM AND YOU REALLY LIKED IT.  
TC: but we ain’t ever got a liking for troll matt mcconagwho.  
CG: THAT’S WHY IT’S A FUCKING CODE, NUMBNUTS!!  
CG: (PS: YOU’RE MISSING OUT ON SOME PRETTY GOOD MOVIES DUE TO THE TASTE CORTEX OF YOUR PAN BEING A WORM-RIDDLED SHIT HAVEN.)  
CG: ANYWAY.  
CG: I’M SORRY. I’M BARELY THINKING STRAIGHT.  
CG: WHAT HAPPENED?  
TC: don’t worry.  
TC: wasn’t a deal.  
TC: I GOT EVERYTHING UNDER CONTROL.

  


* * *

  


Each evening you got your routine. 

Tonight you roll out the sopor and take her with you as you stand beneath the trap spray, turning it to the point that’s too cold for you and too hot for her. You’re not awake enough yet to do more than bitch and fuss. You slough off slime and turn it down to cold as it will chill, and then you stand in front of the reflector pane and bore yourself with the fang paste. 

She towels her hair. She combs it through. Both of you pick at the long black follicles in the hand trap. While you’re still scrubbing she combs your hair, even as you tell her to fucking quit it. Both of you wiggle into your undergarments, sticking to the bits of you that ain’t more than mostly dry; Terecita squirms into a jut huddler and lets you hook it up at her skinny-ass back, wondering how the fuck it fastens. 

When you’re dry, you put your face on. You bind back your mane in an elastic. Terezi squirts paste on her bristle stem and stops dead to watch as you apply paint, geting your white grubgrease all over up into your hair. She sniffs as you work the grey paste into your palpebral flaps and outline ocular. She looks so hard she could die of it. You have never before done this in front of anyone who breathed, not your dad, not nobody.

So you say, “Tell me something you ain’t never told anyone else.”

By the time you snuck back to your block the night previous, it hadn’t been long past midnight. You were rumpled. You were guilty of countenance. Shit continued on with offensive normalcy despite the whole motherfucking universe shifting sideways, and neither of you knew what to do with yourselves. The only thing seemed to be to fritter time sitting on the rest platform in your underbritches, sucking face in front of the slug. 

Later on she would lie in your slime with her cheek on your gut, sleeping in the place only your moirail should sleep. Didn’t mean shit. Just meant she’d sleep without making chalk cipher on the wall. The silence in your respite block was a silence that ate all quiets and hushes. 

“Objection,” she says thickly, scrubbing fang paste. “Remark is leadingly pale.”

“You cannot _still_ motherfucking retain -- ”

“I can’t just turn it off,” she says, and applies her bristle stick. After energetic fang scrubs, she spits a wad of froth out her flap. “Please just acknowledge we have a very complicated kismesis and this is going to be an odd settling period.”

You reach down to flick her aural shell. Terezi turns her head and bites you, leaving a ring of prickmarks and fang foam on your wrist. “It’s a very impractical way of asking for information,” she says, licking paste off her mouth. “I could just tell you anything. You simply want it to be possessive, or you would have just said: _tell me a secret!_ What do you want? That I didn’t wear clothes until I was two sweeps?”

“That’s nothing,” you say. You turn to the reflector pane and you outline your muzzle. “That is nothing at MOTHER FUCKING ALL, I wore the same duds for a whole sweep when I was three because my lusus never showed me the goddamn wardrobifier button. That shirt worked wicked mould.”

“Gross,” she says, and she gets her shirt off the hook and slides her skinny-ass self into it. After a moment she says, “Gamzee, who told you I was researching coolant grubs back on the _Executor?”_

It’s been a while since you thought about it. That night was a long night. You paint the swoops down your mask, up and making the lines clean. “Dunno,” you say. “Like I up and told you, sis, shit came anonymous. Said to go check out Tavbro’s back, and said to check your shit for research tags. Drove me pretty motherfucking wild at the time -- ”

“ -- that is an understatement -- ”

“ -- fuck was I _meant_ to think -- ”

“A message comes through for you? How? _Who?_ You don’t even question it? Who would have known about Tavros’s _back,_ other than Vriska -- and Mr. Appleberry, for some reason?”

You shift, discomfited some. You spot above your ocular sockets and you flicker them shut briefly, meditation done, holiness complete. “Because I was _praying,_ you low-hued faithless. I was getting some motherfucking religion in me. I got praying for Tav and I had visitation, shit was Messiah shit. I prayed, I got a visit. Miracles.”

Terezi leans up to the pane, looking startled. “A visitation,” she repeats.

“Right into my husk. Typed out the words. Clear as fucking glass, don’t you know?”

She opens her mouth like she wants to argue, and you will argue this shit with her until your throat bleeds and her tongue gets worn to a bloody teal stub, but then she closes it. Her maw comes shut. Terecita instead raises her hand like she wants to touch your paint, but you hold her digits away; shit’ll smear. “Do you still have the message?”

“Like hell I do. Deleted itself. It was a _miracle,_ not a motherfucking server bulletin.” 

Her breath makes a damp huff. It curls hot on your hand. You shake her off and zip up into your shirt: she can go on about the past all she wants, because what’s your concern is the future. The future is right there. The future is spilling itself all crude and immediate out into your hands, and it matters so much more than the dusty past. “Are you going to be an Inquisitor, or are you motherfucking not?”

“I already am -- ”

“It ain’t a game. You don’t do a thing just because a fucker told you to, even the old man. You got your agenda. You got your angle.”

Terezi eases up her wrist buttons. _“Those who pledge heresy against the Church of Mirthful Messiahs,”_ she says softly. “I serve justice, Gamzee. I do not crush the wicked. You can go and crush the wicked all you want. If you see a wicked thing you can crush, spindle, maim, mutilate and thoroughly mulch it, go ahead! I will judge the guilty.”

“The Cult?”

“If they are guilty then I’ll judge them. If they stand for something unethical, then I’ll judge them.”

“There’s a GOD DAMN DIFFERENCE between _evil_ and _unethic.”_

She gives one of her bullshit grins of, _and so it is._ Indifferent. Insulting. Her looking down on you from her towering justice pedestal makes you mad inside your pan even moreso than it would have done before tonight, and you’re tugging her hair again, clipping a horn. “You can’t pick and choose what law you say is law,” you say. “Wrong committed to the Church is a _mother fucking wrong._ If you’re getting chucklevoodooed now by him -- if you keep on getting your push on and your push on...”

Terezi’s grin is acid now. “I’m sorry, Subjugglator. A lowly tealblood should never do damage above her station. She should just grovel in a cullpit somewhere where nobody bluer can see her gross decrepitude -- ”

_“I can’t do this shit without you.”_

Her grin drops. You take her shoulders and you shake them a little, both of you squashed together in the tiny ablution block. “I can’t do this,” you enunciate, like you would to a fool, “ _without you._ You made me cull a troll for the good of our continued goddamn existence? You up and crush the wicked _now_ for me, for the good of our continued goddamn existence.”

Those redpop oculars close. Her short lashes brush cheek. You lean forward and close your hands around your legislacerator’s neck, squeeze her throatstem some before cupping up and under her jaw. “Both things were and are unfair,” she says, quiet.

“We didn’t pick a fairness quadrant,” you say, “you motherfuckin’ dummy.”

You kiss her, light as ash. She moves her mouth back so soft and insubstantial against your mouth that her kisses feel transparent. She kisses your new-dry paint, lips the grey at your cheek orbits. She kisses all the shit that is devout on your face, reverent as a subjugglator born. She wants to be herself, but tonight she kisses you more motherfucking purple than teal.

“Let me do you,” you say.

Her eyebrows go haywire. “What -- right _now?”_

“I mean _do_ you, you motherfucking sinner.”

She don’t understand ‘til you take the bind off your hair. You put it in hers. Her eyes go wide as pyres when you wipe your paws and get the tub of white grubgrease, taking a fingerful and working it over her frontpan. She goes still as dead body. This is goddamn anathema. This is ringside as hell. You paint her white from chinbone to nugbone, over her pointed snout and the curve of her lip. When you smear finger over her mouth, she kisses your print so light and so quick you nearly miss it. 

Her eyelashes come down as you give her the first sweep of fixative. Her sniffer twitches. After that you start with the grey grubpaste over her oculars, and she slides her hands into your waistband. She presses her palms up against your hipbones as you outline each eye. Her dead jelly is a pit of red in a circle of ash. You do it on the fly: dot and shape, line and curve. Terezi’s hands shake against your skin.

“There,” you say, and you spray the last cloud of fix on her nug.

  


  


Terecita leans forward and gives the reflector pane a long lick. She leaves a line of gob up the mirrored surface, and then she settles back to blink slow a couple times.

“Ah,” she murmurs, just eloquent as motherfuck. Then she says:

“I look like a douchebag.”

“Shut your putrid -- ”

“Thank you, brother,” she says. “Whoop to the motherfucking whoop, yo.”

This is the dumbest exhortation that ever had the misfortune of coming out her wheeze tunnel. When the nutrition cart comes around with your evening meal, it gets left cold outside the door on account of you’re both making out like frantic. You’d be having each other up against the basin if it wasn’t for time making its tick, tick, tick.

Before the door you tie her tie. Before the door she straightens your lapel. Once you’re out, you’re out: two astride through _Echo Side_ ’s cool halls, its children rather than its strangers. Underpriests stop. Underpriests stare. You expected their contempt, you even motherfucking expected their disturb; but there is a flicker in their jelly that is something like fear. Fear and doubt. You could crack them open and drink it fresh, that’s how much you fucking love it. They make their salute and their whoop as Terecita clatters cane on the floor like there ain’t a care in her pan. 

When you come to the hallway guard, it is the distaste motherfucker on roster again. He takes one gander at your legislacerator and you know he’s been pushed too far. This is too much. He never could have given it abide. He takes one good look at her and then he’s pulling a long knife from his specibus, fingers shaking round the hilt.

“I know damnation when I motherfuckin’ see it,” he says. “I’m gonna carve you up once and for all, you sub-hued bitch.”

He is quick with the blade. He angles it to slice her nug from her shoulders. Terezi knocks his knife away with her cane, quick as a flash, and whips her sword out its sheath. Tonight is not _humblest passage, brother._ Tonight she sticks him like an oinkbeast, runs him right through the shoulder and holds him there to squeal. You take his arm, his flailing arm with the knife in it, and you rip him apart from shoulder to stern.

It feels so motherfucking good. So sweet. So easy. You haven’t had at the violence since you got moved to _Echo Side,_ haven’t corpsed anyone. You leave the dumb fucker in his own bones and blood as your girl wipes her sword off on his front, slides it back to the hilt, and then you step over his body and enter the hallway. 

“Thought you liked the view,” you tell her, “from the moral high ground.”

“There is something to be said for the basement,” says Terezi, and she flicks a gob of blood from her arm.

Tonight there is more than one Cardinal at the lattice gate. Tonight there are two, and as they lift the latch one says, “This way.” They accompany you down the hallway with the hanging bones to another hallway where the walls weep some substance, oily in the low light, and you want to stop to see but they hustle. They unlatch another gate and take you into a chamber with a long table and many chairs, with screens set into the carved walls, and in the center chair is the Grand Highblood.

The Cardinals are talking amongst themselves, and the old man’s tapping at his husktop. A couple of them have their hoods back. This is the first time you’ve seen beneath, and it’s weird as hell. You expected monstrous. They’re just trolls, wearing the paint, oculars ringed cold with indigo, some of them in various stages of old. Their paint looks strange and smooth, and it takes you a moment to realise that their shit’s been inked and needled on, that it ain’t paint at all. They all fall into silence as they see you and your partner, beholding her facial, and you wonder if this isn’t the last sin. You’ll pay for last night’s crime, and roast for this one afresh.

But the old man looks at you with his rheum eyes from his nest of intravenal tubes, and he busts out laughing. He works a rust chuckle. Both you and Terezi bow low to him. “Oh, fuck, little Inquisitors,” he says, and he reaches out to elbow the nearest hooded subjugglator. “God DAMN. Someone’s bones are GETTING THEIR **ROLL ON TONIGHT**. What would my lady have even said?”

That makes all of the Cardinals laugh. Those laughs echo around the room. Hoods snigger. You suddenly feel like you’re six sweeps and stupid, and they all know it.

“Sir,” you say, “we’re ready to carry out your motherfuckin’ task.”

The Grand Highblood makes gesture. One of the Cardinals punches button, and the screens start to light up. On each screen there’s a still frame. In the still frame there are bodies. Each frame got a different angle on it: they’re all wearing the Subjugglator uniform, and they ain’t old. The cohort after yours, in youth. There’s a hole at each temple, worn indigo around. There’s big weals at each wrist, and some of the hands are off entirely. Their mitts have been burned away. Empty eyes stare and dead mouths gape, and behind this dump is paint on the wall. Behind the dump there is the sign of the Signless, and written beneath:

  


**WE SWEAR**   


Next to you, Terezi sharpens. Terezi stills. There’s a relief in her you can’t explicate.

“Do we have an audiovisual of the perpetrator, or perpetrators?” she says.

One of the Cardinals says, “The feed was cut. The cell dispersed. We only have one live suspect in custody. A courtblock greenblood. You’ll find the evidence linked on your palmhusk, Inquisitor.”

Her cane drubs some on the ground. She shifts foot to foot. This shit excites her, always god damn did. “Has the suspect made a confession?” says your partner. “And if so, a confession of what?”

“That’s where YOU COME ON IN,” says the Grand Highblood.

You check out the bodies again. They’re stacked. They weren’t left as they fell. There’s full six of them -- six grown subjugglators down is a motherfucking marvel and a half -- and they lie in a row. The block looks like some storage space. No mess in it, other than them. If they went down fighting, they didn’t rowd in that room.

Terezi says, “What will the purpose of the interrogation be, sir?”

“Allegiance to the Cult of the Signless Sufferer,” says the old man, and each Cardinal in that room raises their hand and makes a perfunctory slit across their throatstem. All hands to each stem in the same sharp slit. “I’ve schoolfed you on this. YOU KNOW WHAT TO LOOK FOR, little sister.”

“But the murders -- ”

“We only need the one,” he says, “to get warrant from HER IMPERIAL CONDESCENSION to carry out our great and righteous work.”

You say, “That’s one motherfucking honour to GET YOUR BESTOW UPON US, sir.” 

What Cardinals you see have thin smiles on their flaps. They flash fang your way. The teeth of the Cardinals are stained pale blue by design. They have ghost grins. The First Laughsassin doesn’t grimace none, but he sits in his chair with ease and no worry in him. Everything got a carnival atmosphere to it. This is the festivity of blood in the water.

“All this I entrust to you,” says the Grand Highblood. “All due faith DO I EMPTY INTO YOUR GOD DAMN HANDS, little brother. Failure ain’t to be tolerated. NO FAILURE WILL BE RENDERED TOLERABLE TO MYSELF AND MY HIGHBLOODS. Come out that room with confirmation or don’t -- come -- **OUT.** ”

Both of you bow again. One of the Cardinals opens the door behind you both, but Terecita don’t turn. She says, “Sir, what do we do once we’ve got the confirmation?”

“You’re Inquisitors, you SMALL-THOUGHTED PLEB,” he says. “You do WHAT IS RIGHT AND CORRECT.”

The Cardinal leads you down the oily hallway. You get stopped before a block. They don’t leave as your partner brings up her palmhusk and sniffs at it, gives the screen a long lick as you try to squint through her god damn ooze trail. All you can do is look at each other, no words to say, before they let you into that chamber. When the door gets shut behind you it clangs like a motherfucking gong.

In the chamber is a chair. Cuffed to the chair is a troll. The troll is a roughed-up greenblood who lifts nug to get wild surmise of you both.

“What is this,” she says hoarsely, “a fucking inquisition?”

Terecita checks her palmhusk again.

“Why, Stenogressor Petrel,” she says, “funny you should say that!”

  


  


  


Your first confession takes forty-one motherfucking minutes.

  



	7. ACT TWO, CHAPTER THREE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Honouring Cephied Variable, Lindensphinx and paraTactician, for services rendered to space juggalos.

**ACT TWO:**

_Sins Of The Fathers_

**CHAPTER THREE**

* * *

  


_Wait for the moment,_ your baby girl’s said. _Always wait. Most interrogation is intimidating silence. We must be methodical, businesslike and persistent. If you mess them around any, it must be to scare. This is not a Church torture session! An answer from pain is an answer from coercion! People will confess anything if it is to cessate pain._

_They all yearn to die as martyrs die, Mr. Huckleberry. This is not the scene we want to set._

Middle of the day. Terezi Pyrope’s set up shop in your cupe. Halfway through the day she’ll sink into your slime and lie there, right next to you, drowsy and shifty. All making herself the big concave serving device. All putting her skinny arms round your ribs.

This is your time to talk, and it’s most of the time you get. Both of you rise and you inquisit. You’re put in a room all night and you inquisit. Right up until the early hours you MOTHERFUCKING _INQUISIT_ , just work, work, work, put in a stuffy-ass detention block and let loose on the fodder. The times when you’re not getting your fucking Inquisition on, you’re briefing or debriefing or chattering fang at some bored transcription priest. Your clock is measured in blood and shit and saline. 

_I don’t like how tears smell,_ she’d said. 

To which you’d made reply: _and I ain’t like how I never get use of the hornscrews EVER, so that’s two of us, you motherfucking killjoy._ And she’d said, _fair enough._

Kismeses shouldn’t share sopor. She sleep-kicks like a braybeast. You’ve rolled over on her so often on purpose she should be drowned. And she fucking snores and she snuffles and she sniffles, drives you _crazy._ Sometimes late when her breathing is even and deep, you take a flap of her elbow flesh and you pinch it, just to hear the pain sound she makes. Just to hear her whine. You’re a troll of simple tastes.

Other times you roll over and get your study on with the abraded bits of her face that ain’t used to the paint. Her skin got pits in it now. There are a couple pimples scattered over her face, just like a pupa. She puts it on anyway each evening, zits and all, both of you clamouring for the reflector.

Those days are the good days. The bad days she’ll leave the cocoon entirely. If you find her the fuck at all you’ll find her taking up dust in some corner, naked and cringing like a bleatbeast. Beyond dignity. The signs she has are deep in her pan now. You don’t know what your old man’s making being playing at, but she’s painting code on what you guess is his account. Most times it’s chalk, but some times she opens up a vein, mostly asleep and not in the right of her fucking mind. 

Other times she says things with the echo of someone whose pan is folding in on itself, says shit that’s more Church chime than it is anything else. The shit she says unsettles. It is illogical noise. She talks about the future and the past, about the now and the now that ain’t ever _happened,_ and then when she shakes back into herself she never quite knows the fuck she said.

Terezi is in the grip of some mirthful fucking gris-gris. You’d be lying, if you said you were at ease. What can you do? You pick her up and you dump her back in the slime, hold her in it until she consents to fucking stay, and in the evening you wake and paint faces and go work. At least you love your work. 

You love your work. It’s all you ever wanted. You got no regret dirtying the worry sac. If something in you’s leaking, it oughtn’t to, ‘cause you got all you ever desired. All you ever did need.

  
\-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] is an idle troll! --  


She likes work too, but you got your differences. When it first came to light that she weren’t all about the wheel nor the horn, the club nor the pliers, you were motherfucking _disappoint._ You are ready to take it to the limit. You have done the worst you can do to a body. What sin’s left to commit? You are fetid with murder, you are unclean with the kill. There is too much stain on you not to see this to the end. Your dignity can’t allow it.

But your partner said: _Gamzee, those are the tools of pleasure._

You were wound round each other in the cupe, listening to how her voice made slur as sleep dug its claws in you both. The way she breathed _tools_ and the way she lisped _pleasure_ made you kind of want to put your hand on her thigh. Or whatever. You know. See where that got you.

Then she said: _if I ever take another troll apart for pleasure, I have done an irredeemable act. I will have lost myself. Something has gone wrong._

You said, _oh girl, ain’t spoke like a hatch of the Alternian empire --_

 _\-- the only troll I may take apart is you,_ she says. _Hornscrews are amateur hour. **You** are my hornscrews._

Midday. Over the announcement antennae comes a raucous _**HONK,**_ shuddering the ship from stern to bowel. It jolts you both from uneasy drowse and pries your eyes wide, makes the sopor shudder around you in your recuperacoon. The silence it leaves behind it is fresh, ripped-up quiet, kind of hot and bright and dry: that’s the second one of the sleeping shift. No rest for the rowdy wicked.

Both of you lie snapped awake, jangling some, lids wide.

“I am going to ram that bell up his shunt and the clanger down his snort,” says Terezi.

“Girl, we’ll make MOTHERFUCKIN’ _FAMILY_ of you yet,” you say, and you roll over on her on purpose.

  


* * *

  
\-- terminallyCapricious [TC] began trolling gallowsCalibrator [GC]! --  


TC: fuck are you.  
TC: WHERE ARE YOU SQUATTING HIDING BEING, SIS.  
TC: don’t you know shit’s near evening.  
GC: 1N TH3 PR4CT1C3 ROOM   
GC: 1 4M GO1NG THROUGH MY R4DD3ST MOV3S B3FOR3 WORK  
GC: TH4T W4S TH3 TH1RD KL4XON CR1CK3T! HOW M4NY T1M3S C4N TH3Y W4K3 US UP >>>>:?  
TC: it be holy week.  
TC: HOLY WEEK MEANS RAUCOUS SOUNDS, YOU DIG?  
TC: holy week means no kissing up to your motherfucking slumber.  
GC: G4MZ33 TH3Y M4K3 HONK1NG NO1S3S OR PL4Y “4C3T4BULOF3MOR4L JO1NTS DONT L13” W1TH 1NCR3D1BL3 LOUDN3SS  
TC: YEAH.  
TC: what’s your point yo. :o?  
GC: MY PO1NT 1S SL33P D3PR1V4T1ON, DUMBDUMB  
GC: PR3TTY MUCH G4MB1T NUMB3R ON3 OF M3NT4L W4RF4R3.  
GC: Y3ST3RD4Y 1N TH3 M3SS H4LL, SOM3 UND3RPR13ST GOT R1PP3D 4P4RT FOR 34T1NG CLUCKB34ST 4PP3ND4G3S ‘S1NFULLY’  
TC: JUST BLOWIN OFF THE BAD STEAM.  
TC: and why would they need it for you now.  
TC: WHY WOULD THEY EVEN.  
TC: you who ain’t slept right in weeks. :o?  
TC: YOU WITH YOUR GRAFFITI GRIS-GRIS.  
TC: practically shitting special stardust.  
TC: NIGH VEGETATIVE WITH VOODOO.  
GC: >:\  
TC: >:o/  
GC: 1 W4S TH1NK1NG TH4T M4YB3 1TS 4 P3N4NC3 P41D, YOU KNOW >:?  
TC: penance.  
GC: FOR B31NG SO COMPL3T3LY UN4BL3 TO SN1FF OUT TH3 PR13ST MURD3RS  
GC: FOR NO L34DS, 4ND CULT1STS 4PL3NTY WHO BR34K B3FOR3 TH3Y B3ND  
TC: question is.  
TC: SINCE WHEN DID YOU WORK THE WICKED PENANCE FROM ANYTHING.  
TC: question is.  
TC: WHEN DID YOU UP AND GIVE A SNORT FOR SIX MURDERED MIRTHFUL.  
GC: WHO4 WHO4 CH3CK YOURS3LF B3C4US3 YOU H4V3 WR3CK3D YOURS3LF  
GC: YOU DONT 3V3N G3T WHO 1 4M 4FT3R 4LL TH1S T1M3, DO YOU >:[  
GC: S1X MURD3R3D M1RTHFUL 1S 4 M1SC4RR14G3 OF JUST1C3  
GC: 1 W1LL C4RRY S1X M1RTHFUL MURD3R3D ON MY M1TTS R1GHT UP UNT1L 1 F1ND OUT WHO M4D3 TH3M MURD3R3D  
GC: M4YB3 TH3 CHURCH 1S G3TT1NG TO M3  
GC: M4YB3 1 DO W4NT P3N4NC3.  
GC: YOU S33 TH3 N1GHT 1 STOP W4NT1NG JUST1C3 W1LL B3 TH3 N1GHT W3 H4V3 DUST 1N OUR OCUL4RS 4ND BLOOD ON OUR TW1TCH3RS 4ND NOT B3 4BL3 TO C4R3 V3RY MUCH FOR 4NYTH1NG OR 4NYON3  
GC: YOU S33 1 KNOW TH4T YOU C4R3 SO MUCH FOR SO M4NY TH1NGS  
GC: 4ND 1T W1LL 4Ll b3 t4k3n 4w4y  
TC: zip your flap.  
GC: 4ll s1l3nc3  
GC: no sound  
GC: s3v3n of our 4rms   
GC: f1v3 of our 3y3s  
GC: o g3n3s1s o g3n3s1s o g3n3s1s  
GC: 3v3n now 1 w1ll t4k3 th3 c4rn1v4l thron3 thr33 t1m3s 4nd you w1ll t4k3 1t tw1c3  
GC: 4nd9u80(R&*#()R  
TC: girl.  
GC: OWER*(YFlk  
TC: TEREZI.  
TC: i said quit it, you fucking fear freak.  
TC: I SAID THE POWER OF HONK COMPELS YOU AND YOUR FALSE PROPHESY.  
GC: 234543gteWOW  
GC: 1 H4V3 4 H34D4CH3  
GC: OH WOW, TH1S 4G41N  
GC: H4V3 YOU 3V3R NOT1C3D TH4T TH3 L1N3S ON TH3 1NS1D3S OF YOUR H4NDS 4R3 V3RY P3RF3CTLY SP4C3D, 1 H4V3 JUST NOT1C3D TH1S 4ND 1T 1S V4GU3LY F4SC1N4T1NG  
TC: YO.  
TC: two and a half hours till evening massacre.  
TC: AM I UP AND WORKING THE MOTHERFUCKING CORRECTION, WICKED SISTER.  
GC: TWO 4ND TW3NTY F1V3 M1NUT3S  
TC: yeah.  
TC: so.  
TC: COME BACK TO BED.  
GC: 4R3 YOU WORR13D  
TC: are you shut the fuck up.  
GC: G4MZ33  
GC: 1TS F1N3  
GC: W3 4R3 F1N3  
GC: TH3R3 1S V3RY L1TTL3 TH4T C4N HURT OR S1CK3N US NOW  
TC: don’t need no comfort from you.  
TC: DON’T NEED YOUR REEKING SOLACE.  
TC: don’t need shit.  
TC: WHAT MORE COULD WE EVER WANT.  
TC: didn’t we got everything.  
TC: WE EVER MOTHER FUCKING WANTED.  
TC: ain’t we won now.  
TC: ain’t we top barkbeast.  
GC: 1 TH1NK YOU M34N 3V3RYTH1NG YOU 3V3R W4NT3D  
GC: 4ND TH3N 4G41N  
GC: 1 TH1NK YOU 4R3 D34D WRONG.  
GC: L1ST3N, 1NQU1S1TOR  
GC: 1 4M RUNN1NG ON V3RY L1TTL3 SL33P 4ND 4LTOG3TH3R TOO M4NY CLUCKB34ST 4PP3ND4G3S   
GC: 4ND TH3R3 1S NOBODY L3FT FOR M3 BUT YOU  
GC: YOU 4ND M3 4ND WH4T 1S Y3T TO COM3  
GC: DONT YOU UND3RST4ND  
GC: 1 M1SS H1M TOO  
TC: :o|  
GC: G4MZ33 1 4M H34D3D B4CK NOW  
GC: 1T 1S T1M3 FOR YOU TO L1V3 UP TO YOUR H4TCH N4M3  
GC: 4ND F4C3   
GC: FULL L1F3 CONS3QU3NC3S

  
\-- gallowsCalibrator [GC] ceased trolling terminallyCapricious [TC]! --  


TC: rephrase.  
TC: DON’T YOU COME THE FUCK BACK TO BED EVER.

  


  
Evening massacre. You’re at altarblock each night before work. You and she get front pew to yourselves; and the front pew is a sight to behold in all its merry-go-round brass, all its wicked circus filigree. Smoke rises. Balls from the holy ballpit roll to a stop near your heels. The Capricious Collective of Cardinals kneel at your left, fill up the row with hoods and horns, and the rest of the faithful are arrayed behind.

The first couple times you took her she sat in that chill pew like a ghoul. She did not go willing. You kind of expected her to burst into char on the threshold, that first entry, but there were no flames to be motherfucking had. Nowadays, there are no grimaces on her mask. There is no distaste. She kneels with her chin tucked low into her collarjoints, ears drinking up each thirsty word like any of the mirthful, looking like she was praying if you weren’t in the knowhow: Terezi ain’t slept right for a while.

Even a cough or a whisper in here turns to an echo. The slightest sound goes bouncing around and around and around. If anyone’s got sore glutes that a chlorine-blood’s sate before the indigo brethren, nobody’s been dumb enough to say. They know what happens.

She came back to your cupe in the eventual, but it wasn’t to sleep. By which you mean: you totally did sex. 

“The first thing for us to understand,” says your old man, “the first thing you **_MUST ACKNOWLEDGE_** , is that though the signs preceding paradise are many and manifold there aren’t BUT _FEW_ TROLLS who esteem them. Two things take place according to the rowdy prophecies, brethren, ONE THING FOR EACH BLESSED BARD: that the signs will be made and that the paradise night will come TOO SILENT FOR THE UNIVERSE TO HEAR ITS CREAK UPON THE STAIR.

“And I tell you -- O FUNNIEST FUCKERS OF MY FLOCK -- that I HAVE _SEEN THESE SIGNS WITH THE EYES IN MY SKULL.”_

The Grand Highblood’s been in the pulpit every morning and every evening. _Echo Side_ ’s been measuring time by fast days and high days, low nights and hunger nights, and Terezi’s kept tick along with it. It ain’t like she’s come out her atheist hovel with the bubble of God carbonating her, underfoot she crunches no stardust, but she won’t keep away. You think of penance. You think of her keyshitting into Trollian. _If he says something,_ she says, _I will be here to hear it._

As your ancestor’s voice scourges the faithful, she jerks her palmhusk out. Terecita shields the glow of the screen with the cup of her hand. No communication husks are allowed during sermon, but who gives a fuck? Ain’t nobody but one who tells you both what to do. No Subjugglator bailiff can get their whip on.

“Sched?” you say, beneath your breath.

“Full hive,” she whispers back, and pockets her palmhusk. “Five clients.”

“Ain’t no rest for the wicked.”

“Or lunchbreak for the overworked. Yuck. I hope they give us sandwiches.”

“Who arranged the skies?” says the troll up front, and his voice rings out fine and dark as midnight. “DO YOU BELIEVE THIS IS THE SHIT THEY ASSIGN THE NAME SCIENCE? They say the comet is a ball of dust and ice travelling through space. I TELL YOU THE COMET IS A _MIRACLE,_ MY PIOUS NINJAS AND NINJETTES, AND I TELL YOU IT IS A MOTHER FUCKING **TOKEN.** I tell you all they attribute to science are signs, and that the Messiahs made these signs to RAP THEIR WICKED NOISE.

“I tell you that trolls ply error, sin, and falsehood, and that in this age THEY PLY THEIR ERROR, SIN AND FALSEHOOD MORE THAN EVER, o ye faithful. I TELL YOU EVEN THE _BLUEST_ OF THESE SHITBLOODS get their oculars on our church and they snigger up their sleeves. No, don’t fret about it. Calm your rampage sacs. LET ‘EM LAUGH, BRETHREN, THE LAST JOKE WAS FORETOLD AS **OURS.**

“For I tell you the lowbloods are having MOTHER FUCKING _WICKEDNESS_ whispered to them in the bright of day.”

The air in the chapelblock smothers and sweats, smells like a couple hundred priests and their paint. The fug of burnt herb doesn’t thin it out none, just wraps it up in stale smoke. It’s dark. The pulpit is strung around with cheap light-up glowworms, the colours bright and hard. A third of them are blown out or winking down from disuse, slowing down, speeding up, looking just like little heart attacks. The rest of the light in there is candles: candles of every shape and size set in saucers, set in half-cut soda bottles, set in bits of old machinery. 

Warped old mirror gleams at each wall. Each panel shows different reflective shit. Some squeeze you down and some puff you up; some make you into zigzag. Some take your visage and they pull it apart when when you get your look on all you see is ugly, like there was never a pretty thing in the world that wasn’t your eyes telling you a lie.

The mirrors bounce the light around as well as the noise. When you tilt up your head and get your squint on at your partner, her face is bathed in oily colours. All attention is on the troll in front. She has her nug raised to listen, lips moving a-soundless with each third word.

“They are a burden to us,” says the Grand Highblood. “They are a burden to themselves. I tell you that everything that breathes is a burden to us, FOR DON’T THEIR NOISOME BREATHING DROWN OUT THE SONG? Everything that moves steps out of beat with the MOST HOLIEST OF RUFFIAN THROW-DOWNS, and their moving is burden to us. And the blood in their arterials is bondage of their corruption AND _OH,_ IT’S A BURDEN TO US TOO, for with it they spend their lives in service of the faithless.

“But listen to the wicked news, my gangsters, for I say to you that they are in their LAST MOTHERFUCKING NIGHTS. The signs have been revealed to me. I have been told, motherfuckers: THIS IS THE LAST SIGN, AND THE LAST SIGN IS THE CESSATION OF ALL HERETIC WHISPER. WE SHALL DROWN IT OUT WITH THE **_LOUDEST HONK._** ”

Girl gnaws her lip. A drop of teal wells up like a tear. Around you, _whoop, whoop_ arises from the faithful. It ricochets around the altarblock like a bullet. It scuttles to a stop like a lost ballpit ball. One of her mitts slips down from her cap and dangles at her side, digits opening and closing.

Your old man says, “Join me in motherfucking prayer.”

The priests lift up their squealers in worship. You side-eye Terezi as they fill the block with chant, each syllable rounded out in a traditional Church thanksgiving: _Your nuts, we want your nuts. We’ll itch and scratch and bite your nuts. Your nuts, we want your nuts. Please, oh please, fuck dirty butts._

You reach down and take her lonesome hand. You pin it to the bar like a beetle. You put your fingers through hers and she puts her fingers through yours, twining all up in this bitch, her fingertips slick with sweat drips. When she smiles at you, it makes her paint crinkle.

“Gamzee,” she whispers, “your religion is dumb.”

Both of you are still giving each other elbow by the time they’re handing out Messianic communion. Normally you’d be first to sip the holy Faygo and see how many hot dogs you could cram inside your flap, but tonight it ain’t got the usual beauty. The painted priests file past, fill up the aisle and wait for their holy weenies, and while they’re at it some chair-bitch puts a chair in front of your pew. It’s your old man who hulks forward and settles himself down in it with a sigh, like he couldn’t kick you all in half without trying.

“Did you enjoy the evening service, Inquisitors?” he says. He is alight with the piety. He is effervescent with the wicked mysteries, you can see it in the settle of his huge old hands. “Ain’t it something to attend GROWN-UP CHURCH.”

You say, “Sir, do you really think we’re all in our motherfuckin’ end days?”

“Yep,” says your old man, without a flicker of doubt. “But mistake me not, child, we were in the END DAYS when I was young and we’ll be in the END DAYS when you’re in your middle sweeps. **TIME,** my fine young fucker, TIME IS SOMETHING YOU WILL COME TO MOTHERFUCKING WORSHIP.”

“A clock’s just a device for cuttin’ up my nights into mother fuckin seconds and MOTHER FUCKIN MINUTES, sir.”

The Grand Highblood leans out. The light from the pulpit gives him green halo. He takes the meat of your aural shell and shakes you by the ear, some, and when you swear he lets you go. Your shell smarts. “That’s as may be,” he says, “but don’t articulate it so fucking loud. You don’t fathom WHO’S _LISTENING.”_

Fuck that noise. Your dignity smarts too. Next to you, Terecita says: “But can you really describe them as end days? Who are they the end of days for?”

“Not us.”

“When do they come for us?”

Something curious in her voice. Like hunger. Both you notice it. You think _your religion is dumb,_ but there’s none of that tainting her throatbox now. Your old man says: “Sounds like I’m getting to your atheist ways, little sister. Do you walk down the path of the true homie? IS THE PAINT ON YOUR FACE SEEPING DOWN TO YOUR BONES?”

“No,” she says, candidly. “But I would be silly to think that the Church of Mirthful Messiahs would predict the end of days without having something concrete to back it up with. I never found an apocalypse that happened by itself.”

You say, “Girl, you grew up next to a fuckin’ _DOOMSDAY_ CLOCK.”

“And it never did anything very interesting!”

The Grand Highblood says, “That’s smallpanned, sister legislacerator. From this far away you should still listen for its TICK -- _TOCK_ \-- TICK.”

The candles get their flicker on over Terezi’s tiptilted face. They colour her green and blue. She looks beyond thoughtful: looks like she did back on _Executor,_ working out some problem in her legal books. Finding a ref for the perfect case quote. Then she raises both mitts and does something you’d have thought her dead before doing: splays her digits in the holiest of crosses. The most carnival of signs. Forks up. Forks down. 

You pinch her hard for heresy’s sake, but she don’t cry out. Your old man looks right through her with gimlet eye and dusty tongue. “You _are_ changing to our ways,” he says.

“No,” she says honestly, “but I think I’m _changing_ , anyhow.”

The Grand Highblood laughs. He gives her forks sideways in blessing.

“GOD’S FLAP,” he says, “to your ear.”

Next to you comes the sound of some priest choking on a pipeful of weenies. The rest of the ninjas will be dutifully turning him upside-down for the penalty Faygo bong. All normal noises of the pious. Your mentor looks over you both with paint-wrinkled eyes, flap a sharp line, and for a moment you think you’re up for receiving holy set-down; nothing comes. He gestures to the chair bitch, and the chair bitch comes to take his sitpillar.

“Blessings for your wicked work today, children,” he says, hauling himself to stand. “NO TIME FOR PRATTLE WHEN THERE IS MUCH TO BE DONE. Little Makara. TINY PYROPE. I’ll see you on the flip side, and may tonight finally be -- fruitful.”

As you’re exiting the altarblock, taking your handfuls of courtesy peppermint shells, neither of you speak much. Her snout wrinkles. Your tread’s heavy. When you’ve squeezed out cult admissions from over eighty unfortunates, the last thing you wanna hear is that you got to be _fruitful._

Maybe both of you are getting complacent, or maybe being hot shit is throwing you off your stride somehow. All this blood and you still ain’t happy. There is a hole in you.

  


* * *

  


“We have to step up our game,” says Terezi.

The first two jobs are a bore. The first two jobs are cut and motherfucking dry. You break to scrub off, standing in the fresherblock and hosing off effluvia. You hold your claws out under the spray and pick off multicoloured clots. You stand shoulder to shoulder, every so often opening your flap so she can put in bits of sandwich. Got to eat on the run.

Ever since the priest murder they’ve been systematically going through everyone involved. Anyone who ever took a fart near the victims is under Church survey. You’ve seen bluebloods to mudbloods. You’ve seen officers to cadets. Girl wanted to view the bodies in question, but they got sent to a Church ship to be made holy and all the evidence is gone, gone, gone. She was sore about that.

You call the most usual type of client _chair-shitters._ The type of troll who got guilt written all over their body, from whom the cult divulgence comes easy: you soon get word of their wicked heresies. _I remember the Signless Sufferer,_ they’ll say, and by the end that’s all they’re spewing, _I swear, I swear, I swear._ Numb of maw. Dead of eye. But the lack of detail you’re getting on the priest murders is making you and she malcontent. The information is paltry. You’ll ask _who,_ and _when,_ and _where,_ but you don’t get jack shit, they just get their die on.

As it is, you and she are working your glutes off. No more getting schoolfed in the lower chamber. No more extracts in the tentblock. When you see the Grand Highblood it is in debrief, stood before his table and receiving his instruction. When you ain’t doing that you’re both taking brew with him and being convivial, talking shop, feeling old, like your wigglerhood got drank up somewhere and you only just noticed.

He’s told you once and he’s told you twice: you’re both good at this. You’re motherfucking naturals. 

She continues, moody-like: “It’s getting tedious.”

“I am BRIM UP with FUCKING TEDIUM,” you say. “You don’t change it up, then I’ll do it for you. I am sick to my soul with these dull-ass heretics. I AM NAUSEOUS WITH OLD HERESIES.”

“I know, I _know._ Something’s got to give. I want to know the rubric for how they even _find_ these, we’ve found cultists without fail but there are so _many --_ ”

“So many who don’t know MOTHER FUCKIN _SHIT.”_

“I have mentioned your religion is stupid,” she says, and turns off the tap. The foam-shitting soapworm mews. You give her finger. “It is. I have said that pain is the tool of the desperate. It is! But we are not going to get Employees Of The Month and a basket of artisanal meats this way we are, and we are also not going to get to the bottom of this case in the method we’re keeping. Justice must be flexible to get through the crooked little holes. What I would like to try, Mr. Huckleberry, is true to the very heart of the Church.”

You’re listening.

“Fear,” says your sister. When she turns to look at you her scorched eyes are alight. She is full up with intent. The word in her mouth is like some kind of sweet. “Fear is the kindling of guilt. It stands to reason that _unjustified_ fear will do nothing, but a _justified_ push -- ”

“ -- will make them squawk like THE SWEETEST BILE-CANARY,” you say. “Ain’t leading, am I correct? Just a shock to the motherfucking system. Fire to the membrane. If they got no spew, they won’t spew it; if they got spew, there will be gush.”

When you give a right answer she shows her teeth in satisfaction. Terezi takes a piece of the lukewarm sandwich -- nut butter and kidney -- and pops it in your mouth. You chew at her with your flap open until she smacks the underside of your chin. “Mr. Makara,” she says, “there is hope for you yet.”

Both of you stand there, kind of close, washing down your meal with weak-ass coffee all too much milk and too little saccharin. You stand there elbow to elbow the same each night. You know the smell of her. You are educated in the irritating slurpy way she drinks her swill. Sometimes the whole universe goes quiet and leaves her there, tapping her claws, bubbling her caffeine, chewing her follicles, and you’re aware -- you’re aware of

_fucking_

EVERYTHING,

wet on your hands, soap in the worm, crust in your mouth, that your girl’s the worst habit you got.

You distract yourself by flipping out your palmhusk. Each night you check it just in case you see _carcinoGeneticist_ in your message hub. Your other sacred habit. His name ain’t ever present: he leaves you love-lorn, he leaves you bereft. Leaves you like having a wound that don’t close. The flesh around it starts to curl and black up. Without Karkat you don’t bug out. Without Karkat, you don’t do the murder act on everything you find untoward: without him, you’re just numb as one of your chair-shitters. You measure time with lymph and teeth. 

You see her with her palmhusk whipped out. You see her sniff through her Trollian hitlist. You see her flap twist.

“What are you going to do,” she says lightly, “when you’re finally together?”

You don’t give a fuck what she thinks an sucker punch is. You don’t give a fuck what she judges of you and him, if it warms her or if it brings her bile. In you is a hole. In you is a hurt. You have waited so long for it to get better, and it ain’t. You don’t give a shit if it’s not better for her either.

“Not let him go. NOT THEN, not ever.”

“That is adorable -- ”

“SEE, I AIN’T SO APT AS _YOU_ TO DO IT -- ”

She backhands you with nut butter still on her knuckles. The priests end up tap-tap-tapping on the door to let you know break’s over, your digits at her lapels, her claws in your armour, your mouths glued together all nasty. When they go from knocking to banging you hold her face in your hand, squash her together till her lips make quackbeast lips and she stamps on your foot. 

“We’re fucking _COMING,_ ” you say, and the frantic knocking eases up. When Terezi mutters, “We’re really not,” and waggles both eyebrows, you both sit around sniggering for a couple secs. 

“Motherfuckin’ hypocrite,” you say, and wipe your hands off on her coat. The butt part. “Ain’t fear just another TOOL OF PLEASURE?”

Your legislacerator extracts herself from you and tucks her cane under one armpit. Her paint’s a little smear. Her breath comes a little quick. You still got it. “Only for _you,_ ” she says, and gestures toward the door. “Shall we?”

The third client is also a chair-shitter. The first time you get gutfear into him, you and she discover this gets wicked literal.

  


* * *

  
\-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] is an idle troll! --  


* * *

  


At the end of the night you’re bone-weary. You’re still garbed in effluvia and the sweet smell of innards, and you want a honey’n’cockroach sandwich and to not do anything for hours and fucking hours. 

She was right about the fear; it worked, even if it made the chair-shitters shit further; you nagged the second till last one with it till they bit their twitcher clean through the middle. So that put paid to _that._ Terezi had said, “The murders,” and coaxed, “the _murders,”_ and that had made them scream: _murder! Murder! Murder, highblood murder is **self-defense!**_ and your sister made you go harder but you went too hard in the end. It’s In Self-Defense is now in the worm midden. Neither of you are happy.

When you both got out you knew there wasn’t to be sandwiches or motherfucking respite, because there was a Cardinal lurking in the hall. If it was one of the bitch-ass transcription priests you wouldn’t bat lid. If it was any average member of the polkadot cloth. But it was a Cardinal, purple hood, carved horn, and though you bow to no Cardinal now you and your girl got brought up short. They give a raw “Whoop, whoop,” and you can’t be assed, but Terezi chirps back, “Family.”

“Our Lord will see you now,” he says.

“But we haven’t signed off on the transcription.”

All the Cardinal says is, “Our Lord will see you now.”

There’s still so much of _Echo Side_ you ain’t seen. It’s the first ship of your dreams, but there’s an edge to the joy you got when you’re lead through its hallways and taken past its grilles. A couple priests stand in an alcove and watch you pass, eyes slit. The high Subjugglator in front of you takes you past the gate that usually leads to the tent sanctum, bones chattering against each other overhead, and leads you to another corridor that’s lined with nails. Both you and your partner go single-file so you won’t snag yourselves as you pass, and at the last gate the Cardinal leaves you at its iron bars. 

The gate too is studded over with gobbety nails; Terezi and you exchange a look in front of the wasp thumbprint.

“In for a beetle, in for a slug,” she says, and winks. You smack her ass.

The gate leads to a block you ain’t never been in at all. Shit’s nothing special. Not like the tentblock, not like the throne room. Your old man hulks there in a hard old sitpillar, settled back on his seatmeat so still and so silent that for a moment you think he’s asleep. There’s a big screen and a vidpanel, and a lot of reeking black cloth behind the sitpillar. Dust lies everywhere. The lamp overhead throws more shadow than sight.

“Children,” he says, proving he’s conscious.

Your partner says in a rush: “Sir, regarding tonight’s work, I think we’ve made progress on -- ”

The Grand Highblood holds up a finger, and that stills your girl’s chatter. Terezi purses her flaps together, and it makes paint bunch in her cheeks. “Leave it be for the debrief,” he says. “MAKARA, WIPE THE PANEL. Pyrope, switch the vid. I got an honour to bestow upon you both.”

Both of you go dutifully to these jobs. Even as the Highblood watches he gives this rattling, stricken sigh, like he can’t decide if he’s satisfied or not. Once you’ve wiped the dust away and your dusty-ass mitts on your pants, and once the vid’s lit, he turns a rheumy ocular toward you both.

“You two both open your canals and listen,” he says.

Something in how he says it makes you two open your canals and listen.

“Stand behind me. Arms behind backs. STARES STRAIGHT AHEAD. No sniffing. No picking. NO BEHAVIOUR THAT IS UNCIVIL OR UNTOWARD, UNMANNERLY OR UNPLEASANT, and if I say a word you follow that word to its _VERIEST MOTHERFUCKING LETTER,_ am I CLEAR?”

You say yeah but Terezi’s just nods, crossed-up with concentration, eyes red glass. There’s a look to your old man’s rheumy stare and tongue twitch, look to him that you never seen before. Urgency. This is urgent. You never seen him be urgent, not even pulling out his clubs to take you both down.

The Grand Highblood clears his throat. Sounds like drain blades pailing.

“The _Alternia,_ ” he says. “Access code: TWO TWO OH, THREE NINE SIX. Recognition: Highblood. Queued: THE FUCK _IMMEDIATELY.”_

The panel chirrups. Screen shows that little rotating pill bug meaning you got to wait, and you can’t guess what the fuck you’re waiting for until it flashes up on some shocked-ass seadweller. 

This is high brass. Guy’s got so many rank pins their shoulders should be broke. You can’t even identify what all the shiny gold braid means, only that they been making extinct the animal that gives off shiny gold braid. When she sees you the seadweller bows so low at the screen that their head dips past their waist, and seadwellers don’t like the bow and they don’t like the scrape. There is some fearful fucking bow and scrape going on anyway.

“Your most Hilarious Hysteria,” she says, in that funky seadweller accent, “she is currently in her private chambers. Would you prefer I first patch through the request and see if -- ”

“When I say immediately,” says the Grand Highblood, “I do not mean any word NOT MOTHERFUCKING ALL SYNONYMOUS WITH _IMMEDIACY.”_

“Very good, my Lord.”

When the screen blinks on again, it takes you a couple to explicate the fuck you’re looking at. There’s a room filled with water, judging by how shit’s moving and the way the shadows sit, and red coral juts out the walls like fireworks that got stuck halfway. Everything is rock and frond. Everything is sand and bubble.

Most of what you behold is foreground trolls. They stand with asses facing you, caught backwards, one ass clad in filmy pink and the other ass in stripes. They’re busy being dressed down by a voice like a sword. 

“ -- a fork away from execution city, little shits,” it’s saying. “Reefer to this again and I’ma not gonna go about taking _your_ heads off, I’ma get all up in the service staff’s business like it was Pointy Jamsmas. Do you get me? Fuckin’ indicate, yo.”

Your old man says, “Let me INTERRUPT.”

The juvie trolls jerk and scuttle to the side off-cam. They part to reveal her Imperious Condescension. The Empress of Alternia stares you down, the Calamity of a Million Empires, the Terror, the Witch. You’ve never seen her but in recording. Terezi misses one breath, then two. Her Imperious Condescension is some troll standing in front of your vid panel with a lot of hair getting its billow on in the water, long horns, long hands.

Maybe her grey is still young and dark and her wrinkles are just fine impatient lines, but you know what you’re seeing is so old and so cold that it is permafrost. Like the old sharks living in the bay. Like someone who got forgot in the oldest hole in the oldest cave in the oldest part of the universe. Your old man’s a spring cluckbeast by comparison and he’s the most decrepit motherfucker you ever beheld. There’s seadweller bling and there’s purple paint and there’s the yellow gold crown, but your pan focuses on the _old._

Her lids are tyrian paint. Her teeth are white. The muscles in her body look like beef floss wrapped round a puppet frame. You’re surprised to find she ain’t beautiful as much as she is fearsome: she incites the awe. Excites the fright. Makes the mass run out the bowel. You ain’t a sopor-addled poet at this time of your life, but she makes you think about the foam on the beach like cream soda and the sand like glass freckles and the water full of suckers and jaws. She is a total babe.

Next to her, the two juvie trolls take their places. You expected them to look like they just shit out an intestine. They don’t. Seadweller faces can’t pull that way. One of them gives a wan wave like you’re at a tea party or some shit, and the other one looks seasick.

“Oh,” she says. “Balls. _You.”_

  


  
Instead of being all bubble like a voice should be underwater, somehow it sounds dry. Must be a sifter worm. “You’re messing my stride,” she says, tongue winding around moray fangs, “on my smacktalk sesh.”

“All my apologies,” says your old man. “AN ENDLESS WATERFALL OF APOLOGIA. How I do love the lash and chastise. How fond I am of the motherfucking KNEEL AND HEEL. There is nothing more beautiful in this universe, lady, nothing more SWEET and **_CORRECT_** than the kind rod -- ”

“Clam it, jackass,” she says. “I forgot you was all about the talk talk talk until I die from the bores, sheesh.”

Your old man don’t clam it for anyone, not even the Infanta of Infanticide. “And prithee, lady, WHY DO YOU GOT MOTHER FUCKING _TWO_ TO DISCIPLINE?”

The Empress makes a noise in the back of her throat, a kind of trill. Like a killer whale on nitrous. Both of the kids flinch at it, like they heard it before and don’t like it at all.

“The sad-ass boy-looking mother fuck is a tagalong,” she says. The sad-ass boy looking mother fuck looks like his face is only made for shitting out grimaces. He got the biggest, saddest glasses you ever seen. “I was all, _why would I carping care about dudes,_ but he’s a friggin’ remora.”

“They not both yours?”

“Gross, fuck you, no,” she says. “I would beat the crap outta purpler bloods than you for _that_ implication. You are on some thin-ass brine, Highblood.”

Your old man doesn’t seem too worried about treading on thin brine, because his ancient head is craning forward to get its squint on. You check ‘em out also. The Princess you can tell right away on account of she’s the spit of the Condesce only working it happier and plumper. She’s a cute. You like trolls with meat on their bones. In her expression is a furrowed interest, like curiosity and worry both got invited to the same party; the look gives you niggle. They two both give you the itch like they’re familiar, like you seen them in a book or an old photo. 

When you dare to glance sidewards at Terezi, her nasals are flared; she’s sniffing as hard as she motherfucking can. You think she’s niggling too.

You look back at the kids. After so much time with him, you got it all forgot how it is to be faced with the Grand Highblood as you’re first time eyeballed. When he stares, both kids lean back like they can get out his orbit. The cape one shudders outright. He’s clever enough to try to cover it up, but otherwise he’s just some dumb fucking fishstick.

“You’re the Orphaner’s get,” says the Highblood to him, sudden.

The kid goes stiff. So does the girl. 

“Yes,” he says, forgetting his motherfucking sir.

But your old man don’t call him out. “You proud of that,” he says pleasantly. “Of course you’re proud, AND WHY WOULD YOU BE _**NOT.**_ Do you wish to TAKE TO THE SEA and be the TERROR OF THE OCEANS, little privateer? DON’T YOU BOAST OF YOUR FINE OLD MOTHERFUCKING LINEAGE?” 

Some of the blanch fades from the juvie’s face. A smirk hesitates on his flap instead and he says, cautious but never cautious enough: “Well, I don’t make bones about bein’ the Orphaner’s descendant, Lord.”

“And do you know of his DREAD FUCKING HISTORIES, son? Know how he got his Admiralty? You know of battles he fought for the Throne against the pirate navies, you _UP TO SNUFF_ about that?”

“Hah, I’m an amateur abhorristorian,” says Seasick. “ _I_ know.”

In his sitpillar, the Grand Highblood relaxes back. One old hand he lays across the other old hand. “He knows. THE BOY IS RIFE WITH AWARENESS. Boy, I bid you tell me story of his FINEST FUCKING HOUR.”

“The Battle a Riptide Cove,” Seasick rattles off, no missing of a beat. There’s a funny warble in his w’s and v’s. “By a long shot. The Orphaner lead the _Alternian Pearl_ into battle with the pirates a the southern armada, and the _Pearl_ was just a corvette with long guns and only a couple thirty-two-pounder carronades, but she sank the armada to the bottom a the cove. It took a perigee to count up all the Imperial plunder.”

“Wrong,” says your old man. 

“Lord -- ?”

“That weren’t his finest hour,” says your old man. “NOT BY A LONG FUCKING SHOT.”

You swear a smirk scuttles over the Condesce’s face. Might’ve been a twitch. 

“The FINEST HOUR of Orphaner Dualscar,” he says, “his TENDEREST MOMENT -- the HIGH POINT OF HIS **PRESTIGIOUS** CAREER -- was when he tried to tell me a mother fucking _JOKE,_ and I split his skin from FLAP TO FUCKING SAC for the effort. I slit him upways and downways. I dripped him crossways and catty-corner. What a PERFECT MOMENT. So fine. _SO APT._ You should have seen his face. Oh, but his face was a SIGHT FOR _SORE MOTHERFUCKING EYES.”_

Seasick’s face sinks, just like his pirate armada.

“If there’s one thing that spoils the slurry, it’s a troll who got no funny bone in his skeleton,” remarks your old man to nobody in particular. “Were I to search his chucklehoard for laughs I would come up ash dry. It was a FUCKING CALAMITY, LET ME TELL YOU. LET ME MOTHERFUCKING COMMUNICATE TO YOU, POOR CHILDREN, that his joke was GOD DAMN **TERRIBLE**. What a heartbreak. I am sorry he bred.”

“Snuff him if you want,” says the Condesce indifferently. 

“There’s an idea,” says your old man.

The Princess cries out, “No!”

There is a fork in the Empress’s hand. It is shiny gold. The tines are sharp as sharp, and she holds it like it was light as a toothpick. With one end she wards the girl off, who’s crazed enough to already be lunging for the sickly-looking dude, and the other end is aimed at Seasick. Guy’s looking sicker and sicker. At this point it looks like he might puke. You kind of hope he does, ‘cause you’ve never seen someone puke while getting culled underwater. 

“Don’t fret, I’ll give him a chance,” the Grand Highblood is saying. He leans forward some. “Let no-one say the church COULD NOT BE MAGNANIMOUS to its old enemies. LET _NOBODY_ SAY I WORKED WICKED UNMERCIES. Let the kid tell me a joke, let’s see if he’s funny. YOU ACQUIESCE?”

Seasick’s throat swallows hard a couple times. His eyes are glassy. “Yeah,” he says. Another hard swallow. “Yes, Lord, I agree. I’ll do it.”

“Eridan!” Both the Princess’s hands are balled fists. Her knuckles are tight and pink, and her eyes are wild. “Eridan, seariously -- Empress, you gave him immunity! You said you gave him immunity! Stop it this instant, I demand you uphold -- ”

"Whatevs, whiny," the Empress says all nonchalant. "A million motherfuckers can't tell me what to do."

“No -- !”

“Fef, _shove it,_ I can glubbin do this, shut up and don’t throw me off -- ”

“You can’t, doofish! You’re not even a _little bit funny!”_

“I’m waiting, child,” says the Grand Highblood. “THE JOKE.”

On the vidscreen Seasick takes a huge breath. Bubbles drift up and out of view. Those skinny-ass shoulders get squared. “Right,” he says. “Right. A course. Okay, so -- a tealblood, a yellowblood and a blueblood walk into a bar, and... no, wait, it’s a yellowblood, ain’t a tealblood -- a yellowblood, a blueblood and a greenlood go walkin’ into a bar, and...”

Those three golden tines slowly raise in his direction. Next to them, each muscle in the girl’s body stands quivering to attention. You anticipate a highblood rainbow spilled right in front of you, live-action, blood in the water. But Seasick don’t freeze,just falters. His twitcher don’t still. 

“ -- so, there’s this grartender, but -- but the grartender ain’t just a troll who’s gettin’ them drinks, he’s not actually a glubbin’ drinks tender he’s this magical thing, he’s -- what’s the word -- anyway he’s all to them _hey, so I grant wishes, what d’you fancy,_ and the greenblood’s all, ‘I wanna be a troll who’s twice as strong,’ so he gets super strong -- ”

The look on the Princess’s face is like she gurgled a culling fork.

“ -- and the yellowblood, they’re like, ‘I wish I was a troll who’s twice as clever,’ and the grartender’s all okay, fine, and they go on and they’re twice as clever, but then the last blueblood’s like _it’s a real drag bein’ a blueblood ‘cause I have to think and be strong all the time, what I really want is to not -- not to be good at doin’ taxes or parkin’ my ship or, or basic hygiene, can you just take most of my pan away,_ so the magician’s all ‘okay done’ and waves his magic wand and the troll turns into a rustblood.”

Dead silence. The girl is frozen with her bow mouth an _o_ , lips a-tremble.

“Son,” says your old man, all soft rasp. “Son, did you just tell me a _CASTEIST JOKE.”_

All the grey leaches from Seasick’s face. Princess don’t breathe. The Empress looks exhaustively bored.

The Grand Highblood says, “Ha.”

 _Ha_ joins another _ha_ and gets it on with _ha ha,_ and then he’s laughing his sandy black laugh right there in the comm room. It crackles into echoes on the walls. It splits itself. There are wicked sniggers happening. Seasick’s staring shifts from horror to confuse. Your old man’s chuckles simmer down.

“Let him live,” he says. The culling fork drops, and the Empress evinces one obvious flash of bereave at the lost chance. “That’s better than THE ORPHANER’S POOR MOTHERFUCKING ATTEMPT. Gave me some noisome horseshit about a seven-inch bugle player.”

Both Princess and Seasick droop in relief. She scrubs her face and then reaches in a whirl for him, giving him a hard shake as they argue in hisses. The Condesce is looking at ‘em both like they’re barnacles attached to her shoe, or piss-spraying anemones, and then she snorts in drear disappointment.

“Out, suckas,” she says, contempt in her squawk. “Reef my sight before I change ma fucking current.”

She don’t have to tell her blobfishes twice. They bow to the screen and scuttle backwards in the water, not daring to turn backwards on you, and the Condesce slowly turns to mount her sitpillar. She seats it like a throne. Each move is made with the elegance of someone who’s moved her body for a million motherfucking sweeps, has worked old repetition, has learnt herself.

When the doors slam behind them, she changes again. The Empress of your race gives a low, little sigh, kind of childlike, all someone who just got told they couldn’t go to a party.There’s a strange softish streak in her voice.

“You’re old as hell,” says her Imperial Condescension. “Probs mad senile. Old and demanding I watch your mouldery ass moulder worse. Old and making me watch you die, you geriatric ol’ ghoulfish.”

“Everyone dies,” he says. “EVERYONE MOTHERFUCKING _MOULDERS.”_

“Not me, yo.”

“Not you, yo,” he agrees.

“You’re old and I bet your ass is haunted,” she says. “I thought you were always gonna linger on and on and on like all nasty clowns do. Think you straight-up lied to me, G-H-B.”

You wonder at how your old man don’t seem to take offense. In fact, he gives a weird kind of shrug all, _you got me,_ and he says indulgent: “NOT WITH _INTENTION,_ but here we are.”

“Makara. You coulda asked me to stall time for you, you shit.”

“Time,” he says, “is the one thing I AIN’T LIKE TO _TOUCH_ WITH MY SINNER’S HAND, my lady, NOT EVEN AT **YOUR** BEHEST.”

“Whatevs.”

That child’s sigh again. She taps her long sticky fingers on the arm of her chair, and the gaze between her and your ancestor holds for a moment. It breaks. Not in anger does it break. Just like they got their fill of looking at each other. After that the Condesce says, “You betta gimme good reason to throw my groove. But let’s check the fry, maybe that’ll give me the cheers.” 

Those paint eyes turn youwards. They get the mark of Gamzee Makara. They start at your horns and work down to your boots. Once the Empress has her fill of you, she flicks over to Terezi, gaze settling on her like she can flay her alive and see all the shit beneath. She looks as though she’s seen all the shit beneath in every troll she ever got an ocular on, and that she never saw shit she liked. Both you and your partner remain perfectly still, and then the weight of that boredom settles back to you.

“That one’s the glubbin’ bubble of you,” she remarks. There’s a flicker of interest. “He good for shit?”

“He’s a GOOD KID,” says the Grand Highblood, and you burn at that even as it glows you. A wiggler seething at being called _wiggler._ But you’re not a kid. Just his little joke. You get it, it’s a hoot and a half. _Kid._ “He’s a drip off the old ooze. I’m going to give him time to see if he is A DESCENDANT WORTHY OF THE NAME.”

“That’s the spirit, yo. Blood outs,” is all she says.

“Blood will MOTHERFUCKING OUT, yes.”

“The other one,” says her Imperial Condescension. Around her pupils is a ring of ruddy crimson. Like a white hopbeast’s eye. “Is that -- ”

“Inquisitor Pyrope,” your old man says, “put on your specs.”

After the briefest hesitate, Terezi takes her spectacles out her pocket and puts them on over her paint. Once each ocular is framed in red plexiglass, the Empress lets out a laugh trill. Sounds like a killer whale with a digestion problem. More like a hard whistle, no humour in it, just air and warble. Apparently her Condesce thinks this is thigh-slappingly funny. Once her sniggering’s over, she looks as stone cold like no sniggering had been enacted at all.

“Oh my cod, you hella dope,” she says. Then she waves one beringed hand in the air. “You go plan your own carpin’ corpse party, you only do what you pacifically wanna do anyway. _Why_ you’re keeping ‘em I don’t comprayhend but who gives a shit.”

“Why you’re keeping yours,” says your ancestor, leaning back in his sitpillar, “I AM DAMNED IF I CAN COMPREHEND. You should have killed her on sight. You should have MOWN THAT POOR PRINCESS DOWN AND CHOKED HER WITH HER CROWN OF OFFICE. You did it for the others. And yet you kept her? I got MY REASONS, but what -- are -- _YOURS?”_

You wondered why he didn’t get riled, earlier. Now you wonder why _she_ don’t. The discontent on that mouth is sour and fleet, just a twitch, just quick. Now it’s the Empress of Alternia’s turn to get a shrug on. “I did it for the lolz,” she says. “And a forced hand. You know how it is. My whine-ass tentacular ma got redonkulous.”

“Horseshit. Nobody forces YOUR HAND.”

“One does.”

“One does,” he agrees.

“The squirt’ll expire,” the Condesce says, “She’ll be an ex-princess soon as soon. Can’t look at her without wanting to snapper her neck, though. My fingers start to _mad_ twitch. But I’ll bide like the fresh Imperial pimp I am, and Mama can go suck it.”

She waves that old, sure hand, languid and don’t-carish. “Okay,” she says. “Cheered up now. Her Imperious Condescension is in tha hive to hear about whatever stupid shit you’ve got to tell her. Banal church news, I’m on it like a bonnet. Some clown invented some new snort, I’ll beatify him, it’s cool. You want new troops to command? I’ll give you a million.”

“The nun’s son is plaguing us again,” says the Highblood.

This doesn’t make the slightest sense, but everything changes. She doesn’t yell, doesn’t let shit show, but everything about her gets hard and glassed over. For a moment she don’t look troll, even, more like an effigy of a troll, some troll sculpture. You got a terrible fear in you, and it’s got nothing to do with Church panic. You’re just kinda convinced she’s about to push a button and make _Echo Side_ explode.

She opens her pink mouth a couple times, like a goldfish having a seizure. “Oh, _hells_ no,” she says.

“Hells yes,” says your old man.

“You’re yankin’ my chain,” she says, “and my chain is made of pure gold. This shit’s not for glubbin’ clown yanks. Son, you’re jumping at mad shadows. You are kicking wavelets. You take that noise back on your twitcher.”

“HE’S _BACK,_ Meenah,” says your old man.

The Condesce lets loose a terrible scream. Both you and Terezi clamp your hands over your aural shells, to try to get away from it. That noise is the beautiful crunch of death to your ear. It is a teeth sound. You feel it rolling up and around your thinkpan, telling parts to die and parts to fail, and when it’s over you feel the kind of dazed like after concussion or sex. Both of you lean up against the sitpillar, and on the vidscreen the Empress is breathing hard.

“You said he was dead,” says her Imperial Condescension, and the easy slang to her is gone. “You brought me his ashes and said he was dead, and that the rest of them were gone or corpses.”

“HE WAS,” your ancestor says. “HE IS. THEY DID. But you can’t deny it, can you? That these times do come again. THE STARS ARE IN A DREADFUL ALIGNMENT, lady, the portents are all of wicked work and _THE CURSE HE SWORE AGAINST US -- ”_

“Evidence,” she says.

“His cult walks again,” says your old man.

With great effort, she raises one clawfingered hand and rubs her temples. Each claw is painted hard fuchsia. The thumb is bladed with gold. Rings with big fat jewels in them crust her digits.

“His cult have been doing dumb-ass shit and wearin’ mega stupid pants for sweeps,” she says, old slangy lilt again but harder. Painted. “I need this to be legit.”

“How motherfucking legit do you desire? Do you think it _COINCIDENCE_ that the flesh of our flesh SLOPS AROUND AT ONCE, **EN MASSE?** Dualscar’s son! Your daughter! My son and Redglare’s daughter! THE FUCKING _SUMMONER,_ lady, I am brimful with surprise that the Cavalreapers ain’t all turned -- they venerated him like SOME CHEAP-ASS _SAINT.”_

“You see omens in your friggin’ cerealworms,” the Condesce whips back. “Who was Sums but some douche with hot abs? I’ve seen spawns come and spawns go. There were descendants before these little codforsaken shits came along and there’ll be descendants after, so the shell you wanting? This is your jam. I got nofin.”

“I want a Messiah enclave aboard each ship,” he says immediate. “I DESIRE MY INQUISITION, lead by my children, to go through EACH SHIP IN THIS FUCKING FLEET until the cultists are weeded out. I want right of instant cull with the Legislacerators enforcing, and all Covertraumatic files. IF WE ARE NOT THOROUGH AND GRIM AND PRECISE, lady, we will have another lowblooded revolution, and this one ain’t like to be as pleasant as the last. THERE WON’T BE NOWHERE TO **ABSCOND** TO, EMPRESS, NOT THIS TIME AROUND.”

She gapes. Then she gives him two middle fingers.

“Screw you, and hell to the no,” she says. “I’m not giving you nasty-ass clowns that much power unless you dish up Sainty McHighpants himself.”

“It’s called _PREVENTATIVE MEASURE...”_

“It’s called WHO’S THE EMPRESS, I’M THE EMPRESS, YOU AIN’T THE EMPRESS,” she snaps. “If it weren’t for your grody lobstersession with the dude, I’d say this was a coup attempt. I gave you everyfin you wanted. I gave you big-ass ships and all the purple jammies you asked for. Now you want me to stick clowns _everywhere_ I glubbin’ look? No way, Joséhe. I’ll let you do yo thing if it gets the cult off my gills, but this shit’s now my way or eff off.

“And if you gross up Nubs before I get my mitts on him -- if he’s chucklehoodooed or whatever -- I’ll wax your ass so quick that Highblood Jr. over there won’t have time to say _hi new throne, aw yeah it’s still warm yo.”_

There is a swell of fearmonger in your old man. He bites the nerve. He gathers the darkness in the comm room. “You know I ain’t waited **_THIS MANY_ MOTHER FUCKING _SWEEPS_ TO NOT HAVE HIS** \-- ”

“Shut the fuck up, Kurloz,” says the Empress. “You already screwed the barkbeast on this once.”

The resulting silence has got enormity. It could eat squalling infant silences.

Eventually, sounding nigh normal, the Grand Highblood says: “There was never a mistake I made that I didn’t _TIDY._ You paid me that compliment once before, and back then it was more like to have me in motherfucking blushes. Lie and say I have never been a MOST DEVOTED SERVANT.”

“Ha ha ha,” she says, “oh man, don’t make me piss myshellf laughin’. Nope.” 

“Amending to without counting those of your boyfriends who require being _**PLUGGED IN**_ ,” he says.

“The only reason I am not jabbing your mouthy ass for that is because I can’t jab through the screen yet,” she says. “I tell ‘em to invent that but do they hell.”

“Empress, I _chose_ you my whole entire _EXISTENCE_ \-- ”

“We’re not young any more,” she says. “Don’t butter me up. You’re not all smoove moves like you were. And you took your _dang_ glubbin’ time getting rid of the catfish with the shitty books. I let you do just what you wanted, when you wanted and what you wanted. Now you can friggin’ learn you a lesson by waiting until you hand over the Signless to me. We tight? We clear?” 

This silence is smaller, pulled taut. The Grand Highblood says, “AS MOONSHINE.”

“Nice,” says the Condesce. “Now get the shell off my screen, asshole.”

The vidscreen gives a little _bip!_ and goes dark. You’re left squinting in the sudden gloam. In this dim you turn your face some towards Terezi’s, and you blind give each other expressions you seldom make but this time it’s warranted: your _ohhhh SHIIIIIIT_ masks. You mouth at her, _daaaaaamn,_ and she mouths at you, _FUUUUUUCK,_ which kind of kills the drama.

In his sitpillar your old man lies so still and so silent he could be rocks. Not a heft of breathe. Not a tremor of speak. You hardly dare do either, and for terrible long-ass seconds there’s just that, you three, until your partner ventures a: “Lord -- ”

The First Laughsassin unbends himself. He gets up off the sitpillar smooth as silk, filling up the room with sheer mass and murder hands. It’s the same way he used to get unbent when he was about to wipe you and her on the floor and then wipe you both some more for polish, and it’s not out of cowardice that you and she step back. 

“Children, if you don’t get me results in a sennight,” he says, “ **I WILL _OPEN YOU UP,_ STUFF YOUR _BLEEDING SHUNTS WITH SWEETBUGS,_ AND LET THE CARDINALS USE YOU FOR HOLY PIÑATAS.**

“ **MUST I TAKE YOUR CONTINUED PRESENCE AS EVIDENCE YOU NEED _MOTHERFUCKING CLARIFICATION_ ON THIS MOTHER FUCKING _POINT?_** ”

Both of you flee.

  


* * *

  


Come midday you’re still malingering with the wide-awakes. You sit opposite each other on the tiny repast platform and cup your fingers round hot grub coffee, both in your underthings, even the light all sloppy and disconsolate on you. You in your pants, her in her undershirt, buttons undone to reveal hatebites on her clavicle. She has her husktop open and is scrolling past profiles of all in the pens, all perps in holding, all those subject to Church interrogation. On a pad of flimsy she takes notes and doodles dragons in the margins, whack-ass looking dragons with big muscle arms. 

She is serene as a motherfucking picture. Nothing sharpens your partner like impossibility.

“This _one at a time_ horseshit is old schoolfeed,” she says, and tosses the pad down. “If they’d only let me have them _interact,_ I could start winnowing out the actual contenders. Inefficiency! Ah, well, we work with what tools we must work with. Get me my chalk, Inquisitor.”

“The fuck for -- ”

“Chalk, Inquisitor.”

You get her the chalk. She sucks thoughtfully on a red one as she takes to the wall, and the wall of your refreshment block becomes a fucking chart. She has you drawing in lines of blood hue while she scribbles ships -- _The Devilfish, Eviscerator, The Vengeance, Imperator, Embolism_ \-- and links them in pattern. Terezi keeps making trips back to the husk, downloads another record, hands you another stick, and you make all dutiful. You’re feeling deference. There’s always tomorrow to put itching spores in her underthings.

Though you abhor the pattern and the line, she uses you as memory bitch. She makes you recall age and employment, death and denial, scribbling links until you got a hell of heretic spirograph decorating your kitchen. She chews the chalk down until her teeth are red. Both you elbow each other and bump each other’s asses out the way, but as nastiness goes that shit is pretty paltry. Besides, you’re expending effort on trying to remember.

Every so often the klaxon blares off, avowing sleeplessness on _Echo Side,_ but you don’t mind it so bad this time. In fact, your sister whistles in time with it while she works. This grates your niggle. It rustles your jimmies. You say: “Someone’s sure CHEERFUL AS SHIT for _WHAT’S BEEN DEEMED,_ sis, have some motherfucking perspective.”

“I am relieved, Gamzee,” she says. “We are looking for an overarching _who_ now. Knowing is half the battle.”

Something in her satisfaction makes you say: “If you’re all up on _knowing,_ I knew that seadweller. The ugly-ass boy.”

Her chalk stops scritch-scratching on the wall. She turns to look at you with red still dusty on her black mouth, hair scraped back in a sweaty tail, paint in disarray. 

“He hung with Karkat,” you say, and you pull back sweeps to find fugged-up memories. So much of that time is just _feeling,_ when you were a wiggler, just long stretches of nothing punctuated with sweet or pain. “HE AND KARKAT WERE MOTHERFUCKING FRIENDSOME. Over wire, you get, they never met any.”

“Mr. Makara, are you _certain -- ”_

“Fuck you,” you say. “YOU KNOW BETTER THAN THAT SAY-SO, I don’t do uncertainties. He lived near my sands, got MOTHERFUCKING _SALTY_ about bottle trash in the shallows. Worked up rough about ringpull floats. A REAL MOTHERFUCKING DETRITUS BITCH. His name was Ampora.”

She gazes blindly, transfixed. Her long tongue flicks out to catch red powder, clumped at the corners of her maw. “Oh, my God,” she says. “Ampora. _Dualscar._ Eridan Ampora! I am a moron.”

“You recollect -- ”

“He was Vriska’s childhood kismesis and her FLARP buddy,” she says. “They went steady for a whole season. At our age that was pretty much a drone commitment, you know? It was hilarious! She was a whole head taller than him and he still had his baby stubs. She broke it off when he got flippy. She and I -- we used to make so much fun of him, she said -- ” 

Terecita breaks it off herself. She says merely, “She had a thing for douchebags. Friends with _Karkat?”_

“Do I got an _echo?_ Goddamn, YOU MALEFACTOR, you met him and you couldn’t even get motherfucking recognition. You’re losing your grip, legislacersister.”

“Gamzee, please,” she says wearily, “I was not hatched blind. I’d only ever seen him with eyes before. His reek wasn’t attractive, by the way, he smells like cough drops -- and he wouldn’t have recognised _me._ What did _Karkat_ see in that?”

Fuck if you know. What attracts Karkat Vantas is a mystery. That which draws Karkat is numinous motherfucking enigma. His love for you is such a bewilder as to seem tenuous. You just let her question lie there, flopping around, and she eventually says, “Karkat always did have his lame quackbeasts.” 

You burn. 

Overhead, the klaxon squeaks. Your pan jangles as over the antennae comes one _HONK,_ followed by the opening bars of _I Make Them Bad Trolls Go Even More Unacceptable._ Terezi lets out a low groan before unbundling herself back to her sitpillar, knocking back cold caffeine. 

You feel the type of tired that’s too bored to go lie in the slime, too twitched to kick back and relax. You’re angry. You’re cold anger. You’re in fury for a mess of shit that could be cured in five seconds if you had a nubby-horned bro to touch you, and a nubby-horned bro you ain’t got; maybe you’re so motherfucking stewed in yourself that when you finally get to him his touch won’t do jack shit. This has been a long time worry. When. If.

When you’re kicking around like this inside your pan you are good for nothing. You bring your kit back to the platform and you scrape back follicle, and you sit there taking off your paint with grub wax. That doesn’t do motherfucking anything but have you sit there angry and naked, her sitting there watching you strip with an expression which -- it destroys, what her face does. It kills.

Terezi reaches forward for a fingerful of the grub wax and starts ridding mask herself. As per usual, she fucks it up. She makes hash of the job. This happens each motherfucking morning. You hook her chair with an ankle and she swears, but you don’t pay her never no mind, you start scrubbing off her mask yourself. You smooth the wax in her flap crinkles and lid crinkles, the blade of her snozz, the soft skin where lies the bags of her eyes. It’s not in you to ever do it too gently, but this you do.

“One day you are going to be Highblood,” she says.

It’s said in revelation tones. For a moment you think she’s feigning Messiahdom again, but she ain’t, and so you stick both thumbs either side of her maw and you pull her flap hard into grinning. She slices you open with one incisor and spits your blood out on the table, which just proves if she’s changed anything it’s that she’s changed to clown manners.

You say, “Don’t contemplate it. Don’t wish him motherfucking ill.”

“It’s true,” says your partner, and you slather wax on her misbegotten face. “He knows it. And so do you! It is a matter of _when_ now, not _if_ or _but_ or even _motherfucking ill._ When might be quite soon. And he will expect me to be by your side when you do it.”

“What _expectation_ would you ABIDE BY -- ”

“I will never really get taken back by the League of Legislacerators,” says Terezi. “I burned that gap spanner without even realizing it, Mr. Huckleberry. They could be forced to have the kismesis of the Grand Highblood in their ranks -- they could even have her as part of the Cruellest Bar -- but she would always be a dreadful liability. A Church plant. A suspect. Just one more watchful ocular.”

As she says this she fixes her voice to sound all reasonable. She is light and thoughtful and philosophical, like this isn’t her motherfucking hatchright she’s all shitting on. Like this isn’t everything her sterile-ass pan ever desired come to paint beneath her digits. You want to hit her.

You say, “ _Kismesis_ isn’t _moirail,_ dope, you don’t owe me no public matter of allegiance. There’s nothing for you but the law and the bore, they fuckin’ KNOW THAT SHIT. No blackballing. No disadvantage. NO CHURCH ALLIANCE DOES THE GIRL OWE.”

“My word. If you _believe_ that, then our mutual material benefactor is going to be deeply disappointed in how dumb you are.”

“You’re _Redglare’s_ motherfuckin’ kith -- ”

“ _Neophyte Redglare_ was boning the _Grand Highblood!_ Lady Redglare kept it a secret for a reason!”

You’ve kind of wondered how well a secret that was kept. If your old man touched her glutes half as much as he kind of implies, then you woulda thought the entire planet got the knowledge of what they were about. “So keep your secrets, I WON’T DENY -- ”

“Gamzee,” she says. “You are _written on my face.”_

Both of you get pause at that. You’re currently wiping off her chin, and tomorrow you’ll do the grey after she does in the white. She can get the first layer on without making it look like she’s leprous, but you got to do the fine details ‘cause she don’t know her way around the sponge with map or satellite. She adds candidly, “We are also having a lot of sex. I mean, wow.”

“I can stop touching your _BONY FUCKING ASS_ if it cranks you -- ”

“As if!” she says. “Oh my God, no, I think about you touching my bony ass one hundred percent of the time. You smell like mildew and I am still thinking about you touching my bony ass _right now.”_

A week ago you would’ve flipped table and jumped her for that. Now you totally don’t, you just think about it to the detriment of thinking about any other shit. You don’t get why she acts like you got the lack in self-restraint.

As you pack back the wax you think it’s funny: it’s not that pailing by itself’s so great, except in stutters and catches when it totally is. Your body is new to her body. All that stuff in caliginous porno’s total horseshit. What gets you is the intimacy, of having some other troll whose meat you can poke and ponder over with motherfucking impunity. You touch her. You wound her. You learn her eight fingers and two thumbs, the sculpture curve of her wristbone. Sometimes the press of her hand got more carnal to it than an orgasm.

You tune back in to hear her drone: “ -- I am just saying, this is one pretense we would be embarrassed to uphold. It will be worse if we do. I do not want to lick my low, low standards in an Imperial gossip flimsy! It’ll come out anyway, come donation season at latest.”

“Keep your shit simplistic. We got leave to not donate.”

“There’s a thought,” she says. “I think perhaps we really shouldn’t breed.”

The way she’s looking at you is kind of half-smile. Half-mirth. Half-rue. That twist to her flap makes you about to tell her how hard you’re going to uphold her pretense in like ten minutes, but her husktop chirps and she flips it open. The smirk disappears as her brows beetle.

“They have cut us down to two interrogations tomorrow,” she says. “Bizarre. They’ve cleared our schedule.”

You say lowly, “Which motherfucking means?” 

Girl’s brow keeps going criss-cross as she looks at your schedule frontways, backways and sideways. She leans down and swipes her twitcher all over the screen, way she does when she wants fine detail, and you’ve seen it too often for it to work wicked hilariousness any more.

“They just updated the shipping schedule,” she says. “Curiouser and dangerouser. Like a dragon with one big, meaty arm.”

“Get your check on with the listing. What kind of rig?”

“Pilgrimage ship,” she says. “The _Terror Wheel._ A shuttle. No extensive bioblock. Can carry one hundred comfortably, two uncomfortably. Originating from -- ”

Another chirp, and those sightfree oculars get wide. “Ah,” she says, with feeling. “Originating from the _Executor.”_

The silence is static. _Executor._ Pilgrimage from _Executor_ won’t be schoolfeeders. Chaplain Chazot is not gonna come sauntering over the dock and try to paddle your glutes for you, the Exarch neither. Pilgrimage would not be pulled from the faithful authority. You don’t like thinking of the _Executor_ too much: bad vibes, blood memory.

There’s lines of inquiry you ain’t too shit-hot at connecting. You’re not the pattern tool. You pull chaos; she commits order. This is one of those times where you got two disparate happenstances and you cannot motherfucking parse them. This is why you two are connected. “It’ll be wiggler pilgrimage,” you say, “pupa prayers. OUR COHORT, YOU GOT IT? But making shrine of _Echo Side._ Make what you motherfucking will of that.”

Terecita leans back in her chair, balancing it on two legs. “Interesting. When would you usually make a pilgrimage?”

“If you were getting Messiah painted,” you say, “but naw, in this case it won’t be the haps. You’d get take to the orbit catacomb. Where they keep the nugs.”

“So would you say this is unusual?”

Of course it’s got its motherfucking unusualities. Only reason you’re here is that you’re the Highblood’s flesh and cell. Only reason your girl’s here is that she too is the Highblood’s flesh and cell. A shipload of juvies to _Echo Side,_ flagship of the Church? They should all be pissing themselves. They should be empty of bladder and delirious with joy.

“Let me sing it to your canal, sweet and low,” you say. “THIS SHIT AIN’T THE MOTHERFUCKING NORM. Not unheard of, but not norm.”

Your girl considers. She looks at you for the longest time, then back at the chart. Checks out all its lines and symmetries. The geometry of your work. Then she stands up and takes her red chalk, and she makes two new entries: _EXECUTOR_ is one, linked up with _TERROR WHEEL,_ joining _ECHO SIDE. Echo Side,_ the locus of all these unholy bitch squiggles.

Her digits dance the chalk between them. A flip to each knuckle, then under over. You think: _BR34K SH4CKL3_ written everywhere in the block, finding _BR34K SH4CKL3_ in the snack hutch like mould.

“Overthinking,” you say. “Convoluting. HOISTED BY YOUR OWN MOTHERFUCKING OVERTHOUGHT. This don’t have shit to do with the murder act.”

“Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. It still requires a keen claw and a large dollop of investigation!” she says. “We have not survived this long by not factoring in every anomaly that comes our way. And it would just be lame to give up now, considering -- everything.”

Both of you get your pensive on. You know you want to live. It’s not even desire. You’re going to live; you always got your knowing on of that. You not living isn’t an option.

Overhead, the klaxon curdles. It squawks out static. The day priest hits a gong, making its clash go loud and bright around the room and your girl’s paws to her ears. After they let that echo in your aurals, static screeches into music: _WIGGLER CAN’T YOU SEE I’M CALLING, A TROLL LIKE YOU SHOULD WEAR A WARNING_

Both of you weary it out till it stops. The shadows beneath her eyes are puke coloured. The shadows beneath her eyes are dull azure. Lank of hair. Dull of mouth. Smears of cold grub wax at her nasals. She is a lament before you. Sleep deprivation, she’d said, the first tool of control. Sometimes you think the dep feels holy, but other times it fogs your lobe and that shit is just sopor all over again. You’re done with the drugs. You’re done with the 

fucking

STUPOR.

Five hours to evening massacre. Both your squints drift to the clock screen, time lying there congealing. Time before you’d just leave. Do your own thing. Kill minutes and seconds in solitude. But that shit dragged before you both got your acknowledge on of not being able to stand her. It sucks harder, being alone.

It occurs: half a sweep you ain’t been parted now. That’s fucked up.

Your partner says, “Do you want to eat potato bugs and make out to _Strifetime_ movies?”

Well, yeah.

She torpors out during _In Which A Troll Of Seven Sweeps Gets Full Of Unplanned Parasites_. Blacks out on your thigh. Nightmares like a barkbeast running in its sleep, which is hilarious-ass shit. Potato bug crumbs down her front. Jut huddler askew. You think about waking her back up or sticking your mitt down her top, touching the undercurve of her breast ‘till she stirs, but you can’t work up the motherfucking botherment. Can’t do anything but sit, dim and blare pressing in all around you. Breath makes her rib bones go in and out. In and out, just softly.

Sometimes at your lawnring, back on the beach, the wind would whip up and the waves would swell till they slithered onto the shoreline. You’d sit there stoned off your nug to watch them crest, each one foaming like a rabid flap. One time Goatdad said to quit it. One time he got his remonstrate on with you to hit high ground when the waves annexed the land. Worked real salty. Only time that motherfucker insisted. So you got yourself more fucked up and more stolid, waiting at highwater, waiting for him to come back and school you again.

Right now you got the same feeling of watching something swell and crest, rising and waiting to break, and all you can do is sit on the bones of your ass and wait to motherfucking ride it.

  
\-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] is an idle troll! --  


You click off your palmhusk. Dadda always said you’d drown.

  


* * *

  


Come evening massacre, the sanctum is a-boil with trolls. You and Terezi emerge through the sphincter and find the whole floor awash with painted priests, idling around, lighting up sodden dog-ends of holy jeffreys, not in the pews like they ought. They part for you and your partner only with overdone obsequiousness. All lowered of eye. All bow. All mutter. It’s bullshit, and you should probably kill a motherfucking couple of them soon to keep them entertained. 

This ain’t the norm for any Church session. As the crowd parts you get the cause for all this fuss, ‘cause kneeling at the doorway and getting sanctified with Faygo are the _Executor’_ s trainee clowns. 

Crowd whoops occasional, but there’s no exhortations to show tits. As far as they’re concerned this gang is worm chow. The lowest of the low. High priest before them is giving them pledge cue:

“When I die, show no pity -- ”

“ _Send my soul to subjugglator city,_ ” they chorus.

You got old recognition of those horns in the crowd. Next to you, Terecita stands transfixed. You hear her pan whirring. Some of the priests are throwing some pimp sneeze, which sticks and glitters to the wet Faygo patches on ‘em. A Messiah got a bike horn out and keeps squeaking it to play the holy tune of _La Cucaracha_ and someone else is blowing an air can. A couple of the cohort weep from the beauty. 

“Gamzee,” your girl hisses, “these are the high-achievers.”

“What -- ”

“The honour students! The A-class! And not the _A-for-Awful_ class! But if they’re here, then where are their...”

As the priest prompts, “Lay two hatchets on my chest,” to the answer “ _and tell my homies I did my best,_ ” her sniffer goes haywire. You follow the point of her snout over to the far side of the corridor, where stands a knot of about twenty sorrier-looking sights: the tealblood legislacerative students. 

Across their flaps has each been painted a purple cross. They ain’t speaking. Their mitts are knuckled tight on their thighs. You remember what a privilege it is that your girl’s been given, what she’s allowed to do and say on _Echo Side_ , what her swillblood would’ve usually got her.

Partners of the faithful. Usually they’d be coming in as _clients_ or as blood paint. You don’t give a shit what happens to any of Parlet’s little cronies. Your girl does, because she’s picked up her cane and is clattering as fast as she can to the far side of the corridor.

You don’t follow. Don’t need to. You got oculars to see; far-off your girl is chattering to them. For a moment there is no recognition. When she starts talking, in unison they get revulse on at her paint. Not a one even tries to hide their their flinch. They are all droop. They are all misery. They are all god damned chumps.

Fuck it. There’s taking joy in the droop of her shoulders, but somehow this shit just makes you malcontent. You give your attention back to the end of the pledge: “ _\-- for lo, behind every wicked successful clown lies a pack of haterz._ You may motherfucking rise.”

They rise, wringing elixir out their shirts. You look over to find your girl, but the crowd’s swelled until she’s lost to you. Whatever. She can take care of her ownself. As you crane, though, one of the _Executors_ squeaks, “Makara?!” and you got a score of curious heads swivelled youwards.

You hated all these pieces of shit, and they held you in contempt. Their look now is disbelief and discomfort. Either they got smaller, or you got taller.

“Mother _fucker_. Makara, is that -- ”

“ -- well, I’ll be fucked -- ”

“ -- holy shit, it’s really -- ”

The laypriest giving them prayer leans over and punches the first squeaker out. It’s funny seeing others your size. Seeing others your size is a joke. The laypriest’s fist is big and their face is small, and indigo founts from their noseholes. “You overreach,” says the priest.

The others don’t blink. You weren’t expecting that. But then again, this act is not for the love of you: it’s a leveller. If they got to pay you reverence, there’s no way a bunch of mucous-holed brats will be let to call you by your name.

“You will refer to the _Inquisitor_ by rank,” the laypriest says, “or the Inquisitor will have his choice of mulch to you mewling, puking shits. Now bow, oinkers.” They bob in bow. “Good. Now whoop.” They sussurate _whoop, whoop._

Laypriest looks at you all, _well, do you wanna waste one anyway,_ but you say, “FAMILY,” work it real merciful. The light in their eyes is still doubt. Resentment. Unsurety. They’re sizing you up again. You ain’t the dumb fuck who got zero exactly on the mock examinations, but you’re not the feral motherfucker champing on the end of Terecita’s leash. 

They’re waiting for more. Full of hesitate. So you say, extra sugared: “Let them go get their worship on.”

“As you will it, brother.”

Some of them bow to you again, just in case. You want to laugh. They waddle through the open altarblock doors like quacklings, still dripping redpop, and you look to see if you can find your legislacerator. The end of the corridor’s empty of all law bores, yours included.

You slope into church without her and kneel at the pew on your lonesome. She’ll be back, you guess. You got your interrogations later. For the moment you’re left in the great and terrible cathedral of _Echo Side_ sniffing rude incense and feeling fucking bereft, all on account of she’s not there to play _Hangtroll_ on a piece of flimsy next to you.

When the Cardinals are all arrayed and they assist your old man into the pulpit, he gives tonight a shorter sermon. You imagine the trainees pop-eyed at the sight of him. You imagine their caps liquid and their palms clamming. There’s no other reaction to give your first sight of the Grand Highblood: he is a mesmer, he draws the eye and turns the rest of the room to smoke just by breathing.

“There are children here tonight,” he says, in his deep, cinderous voice. “The clown young who are new to being down with it. The truly dope young grubs who desire to be high ordained comedians. GOOD. This is a sermon for those wrigglers to bear witness to.”

They must be perched all the way in the ass of the block, but you still think you can feel them sharpen. Get excited. Give out little puffs of juice, in the atmosphere of such chucklevoodoo. You wish you were that young and dumb; it ain’t like the mystery and the magic has gone, just that you can’t give yourself over to it in ecstasies. Your pan and hands are heavy from too little sleep and too much _Strifetime_ film.

“I am not here to school you on the paradise planet, pupae,” he says. “I DO NOT MOTHERFUCKING STAND BEFORE YOU TO PREACH OF THE BAD ASS, NOR OF THE RIGHTEOUS, NOR OF THE UNDERGROUND. 

“Wigglers, I stand before you to tell you that I have seen shit that would ELECTRIFY YOUR LIDS, and that I have seen that we dwell in the belly of a _DYING STAR_.”

You wait to see if he looks at you, but he doesn’t. You drift off a little. You let the panic wash over you and prickle you from horns to toes, but you hunker down in that adrenaline and you motherfucking buzz with it. Words go in your aurals and you don’t pay them any attention. The sermons of your ancestor are poetry. They are sick midnight raps. But you gotta be frank with yourself: if you get any more tired, you’re going to shit yourself and die.

“ -- the twin bards have foretold coming of the cursed prophet,” your old man’s saying, and you drift back in. “YES, WE ARE ACCURSED WITH PROPHECY. Yes, there will be more than one twitcher spouting fortune-telling. But the shouter of the loudest lie will come, AND NO THREAT TO ALL THAT’S ROWDY COULD BE GREATER.

“He will be filled with disbelief. He will be punctured of eye, half-blind, half-mad. He will be stubby and unfortunate. HIS BLOOD WILL BE OF GROTESQUE MOTHERFUCKING HUE. He will be clad from tit to toe; he will wear high garments... **WHY** AM I GIVING YOU DESCRIPTION, CHILDREN? Because you live in a generation that will be afflicted with great wrath and punishment. THIS IS IT. Weep for joy. You will get all the blood you can shed and cull, and if you KEEP YOUR DIM EYES OPEN AND YOUR DEAF CANALS WIDE I will fucking _PROVIDE_ you such.”

Your old man goes on like this for a while. Though you check your palmhusk a couple times, there’s nobody you want to rap with online and nobody talking to you, so you don’t bother with it. The little dot by _gallowsCalibrator_ remains grey.

“VERILY I SAY UNTO YOU VERMIN: this generation shall not pass away until all monsters are slain and all false twitchers stilled. Alternia shall pass away. The universe will cool and dim and finally pass away also. BUT MY WORDS, CHILDREN -- MY WORDS WILL FUCKING **LINGER**.”

Whoop, whoop.

There’s special prayer afterward and they bring in some effigy for the congregation to throw bottles at, some wrapped lowblood troll labelled **FUCK WI-FI** , and that amuses until service is over. You wonder if your old man’s going to get his condescend on to talk -- after what happened last night, if he wants to see hide or hair of you -- but he’s deep in natter with one of the Cardinals. The chair bitch goes unused. You’re not going to get words of wisdom tonight.

Faithful go up to get holy communion again, beaned with bottles of Faygo. You idle consider throwing a couple, but before you make up your mind, there’s a shadow at the end of your pew.

“Whoop, whoop, Inquisitor,” it says. “Wasn’t that an inspiring sermon? By the way, where _did_ you stash Ms. Pyrope?”

The sister before you is one of the _Executor_ students. Fucked if you recall her name. Got a lot of hair on her. Good horns. Nice tits. The voice she speaks in is a low, laughing voice, no fear or awe in it: no lowered lid, no blush. The sister is downright motherfucking impertinent. 

You could waste her and no questions flapped, but whatever, you’re a sucker for big venom sacs.

  


  
“ _Inquisitor_ Pyrope to you,” you say. “PYROPE **OUTRANKS** YOU, CHICA, DON’T YOU KNOW?”

It doesn’t worry her none. “Congratulations are in order,” she says. “I’d hoped to give them in person, you understand. Ah, well! I’ve missed her _abominably_ , Inquisitor. Has she been well? Have you cared for her health? Played nice?” 

There’s slyness there. Tastes like innuendo. The sister’s poking, but you don’t know what the fuck for. “Give it up,” you say. “She got no friends among the highbloods. GIRL HAD NO SUPPORTERS, NOT A ONE.”

Sis says, “I was more of a friend to her than she knew.”

This disquiets.

“If you’re quadrant angling, you go write it on some flimsy and shove it up your shunt,” you say. 

Sister’s hand flies to her mouth, flap a moue of false-ass surprise. "I would never dare to look so far above myself," she says. "I knew long ago I'd never do anything but cry lovelorn tears for Teach. No, I -- I want a job."

You go from _disquiet_ to _blindside_. Sister’s got no fucking shame whatever, you’ll give her that. The sister has moxy. “You’ll understand why I’d be so bold as to trouble _you_ with this,” she says, “but considering my background and my track record, I hope you’ll forgive me my motherfucking trespasses. It’s a tough market for a troll out of graduation.”

“Chica,” you say, “I DON’T EVEN GOT THE RECOLLECTION OF YOUR MOTHERFUCKING NAME.”

The mask slips. The facial is irritated. She wipes her flap back into a smile all careful, all neat, and she says: “Subjugglator Velher.” You shake your head. “Velher. Linnea Velher?” Ditto. “I was extremely popular? Second in the Church rankings? I sat in front of you in _Scripture?_ I’m fairly sure I once gave you some gum?” Nope. “Inquisitor,” she says, kind of exasperated, “is it possible you weren't conscious that _entire quarter-sweep?”_

You rise from the pew. You tower over her. Your baby girl is a shorty, but apparently somewhere along the way you got your tower on over all and motherfucking sundry. It’s a good feeling. In you is the knowledge of gut and pus. You are lousy with blood. 

It ain’t out of impatience that you say, “Chica,” and lean in some. There is no impatience in you for this. “Chica, if I could have killed every motherfucker on _Executor,_ I WOULD HAVE KILLED EVERY MOTHERFUCKER ON _EXECUTOR.”_

This gives the Subjugglator pause. In her flap is the tremble of some question. Consideration, anyway. But then her gaze travels to your collar, fixes itself there, and those arched brows lift. You appreciate; she plies her paint with clever digits.

“Inquisitor Makara,” she says, “has nobody taught you how to hide your exceptionally large hickeys?”

Okay. You can’t foist her off fucking quick enough. You turn around and get the attention of the nearest hood, nonplussing the shit out of one of the College by presenting Subjugglator Whotheher to them. No pause needed or given by the trainee. She smiles so big and white and starry that she could be a constellation.

“Here,” you tell the Cardinal. “Give this truly bitchtits sister to the RIGHT PEOPLE, you hear me? The Carnivillains. The Pilgrins. The fuckin’ Laughsassins or something, I don’t care. OUR SISTER OVER HERE HAS HIGH RANKING AND A FUCKING LOOSENESS WITH GUM.”

Before you can leave Vellawhat to the mercies of a Cardinal, she catches your mitt. You nearly do commit something on her for that. You ain’t used to being touched except by one, and that was an attrition war. “Wait,” she says, voice low. “Please remember me to Inquisitor Pyrope, and tell her that -- the offer is still open.”

You shake her off. “CHICA,” you say, “I won’t remember you after thirty motherfucking seconds.”

Once you get to the end of the chapelblock and find no teal coat or red eye to be found, you hold this promise. Whatever that was about, you’re pretty sure you’re never going to strain your pan about it again.

  


* * *

  


You don’t see your partner again until time comes for the interrogation sched. You find her in the waiting room, applying glove, skimming file, busying herself before you make some heretic chunder from fright. There is a burnt weariness to her. She looks like she don’t desire to be brushed or needled, touched nor torn.

“They waxed motherfucking sore afraid of you,” you say. Like you weren’t going to brush or needle, touch or tear.

“I don’t want to talk about it, Mr. Makara.”

“You’re down because _Executor_ miscreants don’t think you’re motherfucking kin -- ”

“If I am _down,_ ” she says with asperity, “it is for lots of nuanced reasons, none of which I want to talk about with someone who thinks _nuance_ is a type of music. The dragon is closed for emotional discussion. Give me a bib, I’m sick of laundering my clothes each time.”

You don’t give her the bib. You elbow the storage cell shut with a bang and you press into her back, forcing her hip into the hard edge of the handtrap. Her horns scratch up against your middle, her shoulders set. Terezi’s hair smells kinda like coffee and a bag of wet sand.

“Oh girl,” you say, “girl GIRL girl, here is the MOTHERFUCKING SAD CRUX OF THE MATTER. You talk callous, but you squirt saline over the idea of disconnect, don’t you? YOU ARE MOTHERFUCKING HET UP AT THEIR DISTASTE. You want to wring love from chucklefucks who would have clapped at your culling. THAT IS SOME SAD MOTHER FUCKING VANITY AND NO MISTAKE.”

“Alehks is dead,” says Terezi, “and the General-Advocate is under investigation.”

You don’t know _Alehks_ and neither do you give a shit. News that the Advocate is under heat interests you more. The Brigadier-General’s mated to _Executor._ The Brigadier-General practically pails _Executor._ All is schoolfeed and tedium with Parlet. If she got notice by the Church for crimes and suspicions, wouldn’t you have got the know about it already? This explains your girl’s terse flap; she’s fucking gaga for the fucking Advocate.

“Now the best motherfucking joke,” you say, leaning in, “most bitchtits chuckle WOULD BE THE ADVOCATE IN OUR MOTHER FUCKING CHAIR.”

Your girl hefts her cane at its midpoint, and she slams it up into the underside of your chin. You don’t bother with dodge; you won already. The dragonhead slices your neck raw. As you step back feel the cold bite of your bleeding, the glitter of pain.

“Your jokes suck,” she says, contemptuous. “Learn to troll.”

Both your interrogations last well into the evening. You learn how to push just enough so that a troll’s lucidity is there on the very edge of madness, a fear they’re wide awake for. Your second client’s some journallistic, some news dreg, and Terezi gets bloody with them. You note your girl doesn’t get bloody when she’s mad. She gets bloody when she is calm and crystallized. She backhands them with all the politeness of someone doing it for sport.

 _I didn’t see it!_ they garble. _I couldn’t do anything! I’m a Sufferite but I wasn’t on the team!_

“They’re in cells,” she tells you later, when they’re both dead and cooling. You’re ticking off transcriptions. She is gluey with olive and her anger’s skidaddled. “Definitely grouped! But their cells appear to be both very badly organized and _very_ well-done. Is this just a group of worshippers in secret, or a band of terrorists, or both?”

“Little fucking difference,” you say, “save in execution.”

“Motive, Mr. Huckleberry, what was the _motive_ for publicly killing six subjugglators that day -- ”

“Make a presence. Disturb the motherfucking water.”

“Shallow! Obvious! No. None of these people have seemed in the business of _disturbance.”_

Girl seems distant. You don’t give a fuck for motive, truth be told. The motive ain’t what interests you. The result is. Motive is too easy: who needs a motherfucking _reason_ to do anything? How can you guess at it? How can you make play with the whys and wherefores? If you want to think _motive,_ you’d want to know why a troll got into the business of the Signless cult, and you find yourself spilling that shit to her as you scrub.

“It got nothing to offer,” you say. “NO PROMISES. No miracles. NO STUPENDOUS ACTS OR BAD ASSERY. It ain’t a salvation religion.”

“I am not talking theology with you unless I am so drunk,” says your partner, but she starts to twitch interested. You know by the scrunch of her nose. “But it is interesting, isn’t it? Why would someone join the Cult. Who would? What would it give them? What _inspires.”_

“WHAT,” you say. “What. MOTHER FUCKING WHAT. It’s not what you bear witness to, never was. What don’t turn the unbelievers believing. Comes back to God, sis, don’t you know? It’s more like _who.”_

Girl stands stock-still.

“Sometimes, Mr. Grape Faygo,” she says, “you are a jewel.”

Terecita puts back the soap-shitting foamworm and wipes her hands down on your tunic. By this pettiness do you know her. “I’m going to go do some reading,” she says. She reaches up to pull your collar down and to bite your lip swiftly, then detaches. “Order me dinner.”

This domestic shit’s like being quadrantlocked. Next thing you know she’ll be giving you a ringworm and somebody will bust out with the commitment maggot. When you slope back to your room you think about ordering whatever she don’t like worst, just for a lone snigger, but your palmhusk chirps and all dinner thoughts exit your pan.

  
\-- a****T******* [AT] 8egan 8la88ing at terminallyCapricious [TC] \--  


**** YOU ARE NOW CHATTING THROUGH xX~*SERKETWARE*~Xx! ****  
**** WOW!!!!!!!! ****

**** HAXCKED 8Y VRISKA SERKET FOR xX~*VRISKA SERKET*~Xx ****  
**** PROGRAMMED 8Y xX~*VRISKA SERKET*~Xx ****  
**** ALL RIGHTS 8ELONG TO xX~*VRISKA SERKET*~Xx ****

AT: hELLO hELLO,  
AT: pLEASE COME THROUGH, rOGER, aRE YOU RECIEVING,  
AT: nOT THAT i AM LOOKING FOR ANYONE NAMED rOGER, tHIS IS SIMPLY THE WORD YOU USE WHEN SIGNALLING, tO INDICATE STUFF OF THAT NATURE,  
TC: tavbro.  
TC: HOLY MOTHER FUCK. :oO  
TC: that really you yo.  
AT: tHAT’S DEFINITELY A DISCONCERTING QUIRK YOU HAVE THERE,  
AT: bUT SEASONED AS I AM WITH THE DANGEROUS AND DISTASTEFUL LIFESTYLE i NOW LIVE, i’M FINE WITH IT,  
AT: iT’S REALLY ME,  
AT: aND IT’S REALLY GOOD TO SEE YOU, AS IT WERE,  
AT: nOT THAT i’M ACTUALLY SEEING YOU,   
AT: wE’RE TYPING,  
AT: hA HA, WOW, i GUESS i SOUND WHAT vRISKA WOULD CORRECTLY CALL A LOSER RIGHT NOW, BUT GUESS WHAT, UP YOURS HONEY,  
TC: NO OTHER SOUND WOULD I WANT TO MOTHERFUCKIN GET IN MY EARS BRO.  
TC: no sight would i want to see.   
TC: shit’s miraculous.  
TC: :o)  
TC: KINDA THOUGHT BETIMES I’D NEVER SEE MY BROWNBLOODED MOTHERFUCKER AGAIN.  
TC: sacrilege thoughts.  
TC: FORGIVE ME FAITHLESSNESS. :o(  
AT: nOTHING TO FORGIVE,  
AT: i HAD WANTED TO SEE YOU AGAIN, AND EVEN IF THAT THOUGHT WAS NAЇVE IT DIDN’T MAKE IT DUMB, OR LESS UNLIKELY, BUT NOT STUPID AT ALL,  
AT: dOES THAT MAKE SENSE,  
TC: bite of sensical roast.  
TC: INCH DEEP IN SENSE GRAVY.  
AT: eXCELLENT, i’VE BEEN WORKING HARD ON TAKING MY OWN THOUGHTS SERIOUSLY, IN AN EMPOWERMENT WAY, ON ACCOUNT OF NOBODY ELSE WILL,  
TC: HONK.  
TC: uhh bro do not mistake me.  
TC: DO NOT GET MISTAKEN ON THIS ISSUE HERE.  
TC: but you’re a wanted gangster, you get?  
TC: DANGEROUS BUSINESS GETTING OUR TALK ON.  
TC: still don’t want you ratted no matter what divides.  
AT: i’M NOT WORRYING ABOUT ME, BECAUSE I’M MORE WORRYING ABOUT YOU,  
AT: a CERTAIN SOMEONE TOLD ME THAT i SHOULD MAKE SURE YOU WERE OK NO MATTER WHAT,  
AT: i MEAN, I WOULD HAVE ENDEAVORED TO CARRY THIS OUT, ANYWAY,  
AT: gAMZEE YOU’RE IN DANGER,  
TC: :o?  
TC: I AM SAFE AS MOTHERFUCKIN HIVES, MY MOST RIGHTEOUS LOWBRO.  
TC: me and she both.  
AT: yOU’RE REALLY NOT,  
AT: yES YOU’RE A HIGHBLOOD, AND YES YOU’RE PROTECTED BY WHO YOU ARE AND WHAT YOU’RE DOING,  
AT: bUT THIS IS MORE ABOUT, SPIRITUAL SAFETY, OR AT LEAST MORALITY SAFETY, OR ABOUT WHAT YOU’RE UP TO,  
AT: gAMZEE, THE CHURCH OF MIRTHFUL MESSIAHS IS NOT GOOD,  
AT: iT’S BAD, PUT BLUNTLY,  
AT: yOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO BECOME SOMETHING TERRIBLE OR YOU’RE GOING TO BECOME COLLATERAL, THIS IS FACTUAL, AN ACTUAL HAPPENSTANCE,  
TC: what you’re saying grieves the pusher.  
TC: BUT YOU’RE RAPPING IT SO I LIKE IT?  
TC: ugh, this shit confuses.  
AT: gAMZEE i AM NOT RAPPING TO OBFUSCATE,   
TC: wait.   
TC: HOW’D YOU UP AND GET SO MUCH KNOWING ABOUT MY CALLING.  
TC: CERTAIN SOMEONE IS A MOTHERFUCKING WHO.  
AT: i REALLY DON’T WANT TO BE OBVIOUS, bUT THE CERTAIN SOMEONE HAS A NAME BEGINNING WITH K, AND IS A CERTAIN SOMEONE WHO IS ALSO DEFINITELY IN A VERY AWKWARD AND TENUOUS POSITION,  
TC: let us get one thing mother fucking clear.  
TC: BRO YOU TELL ME IF HE IS IN DANGER RIGHT THE HELL NOW.  
TC: please.  
TC: i ain’t chill about this.  
AT: wE’RE ALL IN DANGER,  
AT: bUT i DON’T THINK HIS DANGER WAS TOO SPECIFIC THE LAST TIME HE AND I TALKED, uNLIKE YOURS, wHICH IS SPECIFIC AND PRETTY OVERT,  
AT: aND i THINK WHAT YOU NEED TO START THINKING ABOUT, iS WHERE YOU WILL GO IF YOU NEED TO ESCAPE,  
TC: dirtbrother.  
TC: BROTHER WITH THE PROFANE WINGS UPON HIS BACK.  
TC: you gotta rap this one, no interest in me for escaping.  
TC: WHY ESCAPE FROM YOUR TRUE HOME.  
AT: oH, I DON’T KNOW,  
AT: mAYBE BECAUSE IT IS AN EVIL HIGHBLOOD SHIP FULL OF CLOWN THINGS i USED TO NOT UNDERSTAND EXCEPT NOW i UNDERSTAND THE FULL RAMIFICATIONS, oF THE DANGER THEY REPRESENT TO ANYONE SEEKING TRUTH, IF THEY HAVE LOW BLOOD OR EVEN HIGH BLOOD, iS THAT A GOOD ENOUGH REASON i MEAN HOLY SHIT,  
AT: uHH,  
AT: tHAT WAS BLUNT BUT,  
AT: tHAT WAS TOO BLUNT WASN’T IT,  
TC: that.  
TC: WAS RIDICULOUSLY MOTHERFUCKING SASSY.  
TC: wow.  
TC: kind of downright hot if you want this bro’s opinion.  
AT: uM,  
TC: >:o)  
TC: > :o)  
TC: >:o)  
AT: mOVING ON, TO ANOTHER TOPIC, BEING GRATEFUL THAT WASN’T TOO BLUNT BUT BEING KIND OF REGRETFUL THAT IT WAS SASSY,  
AT: lOOK, i CAME HERE TO OFFER YOU HELP IF YOU EVER NEEDED IT, iF YOU EVER WANTED TO GET AWAY, FOR YOU AND TEREZI BOTH,  
AT: wE ARE KIND OF AS FAR AWAY FROM SUBJUGGLATOR SPACE AS IT IS POSSIBLE TO GET, IN TERMS OF FARNESS, bUT I’LL COME FOR YOU NO MATTER HOW INCONVENIENT,  
TC: tavbro.  
TC: sing it to me serious.  
TC: the hell is my nubby brother doing.  
TC: i am in such a motherfucking fear.  
AT: yOUR NUBBY BROTHER, IF WE ARE TALKING ABOUT THE SAME BROTHER WITH A QUALITY OF NUBBINESS, iS,  
TC: is.  
AT: iS i DON’T REALLY KNOW, NONE OF US KNOW, I WAS HOPING YOU KNEW MORE, EVERYTHING HAPPENS SO MUCH,  
AT: i WISH i HAD NEWS, BUT LAST I HEARD HE WAS SITTING IT ALL OUT,  
TC: and it be.  
AT: eVERYTHING,  
AT: i REALLY CAN’T TALK, I’M HONESTLY SORRY, BUT THAT’S WHAT HE KEEPS ON SAYING IN ANY CASE,  
TC: THAT’S ENOUGH FOR ME YO.  
TC: it will be enough.  
TC: gotta be enough.  
AT: i’M GOING TO SEND YOU THE ENCRYPTED SIGNAL CO-ORDINATES, tHE PASSWORD IS SQUEALADILLO,   
AT: i PICKED IT BECAUSE i ALWAYS GOT PUT IN MIND OF YOU, PLAYING FIDUSPAWN, i HAD A DECK FOR YOU READY IF YOU EVER WANTED TO PLAY AND i PICKED OUT THAT CREATURE, sORT OF PERSONALLY,  
AT: bUT THEN YOU KEPT FORGETTING WHAT FIDUSPAWN WAS, AND ZONING OUT,  
AT: fOR OLD TIME’S SAKE ANYWAY THAT’S THE PASSWORD, SO MAYBE WRITE IT DOWN,  
TC: ha ha ha.  
TC: DON’T NEED TO, BROTHER.  
TC: can’t forget a word i read.  
TC: THEY JUST END UP STICKING IN MY PAN AND MOULDERING ON THE WALLS.  
TC: keep going round and round like a nastyass tilt-a-whirl.  
AT: wOW, THAT SOUNDS USEFUL,  
TC: it ain’t.  
AT: i’D TALK FOR LONGER IF I COULD, BUT i THINK VRISKA OVERESTIMATES HOW SAFE HER LINES ARE, aND THE mINDFANG DOESN’T HAVE THE SPEED TO OUTRUN A CRUISER FOR THAT LONG,  
AT: i KNOW EVERYTHING IS DIFFERENT NOW, bUT ONE THING THAT ISN’T DIFFERENT IS THAT YOU’RE MY FRIEND,  
AT: aND i STILL LIKE TALKING TO YOU,  
AT: bUT, OH, IN REQUESTING INFORMATION FOR SOMEONE ELSE WHO I DON’T THINK WOULD ASK IT, HOW’S TEREZI,   
TC: horrible.  
TC: how’s that nasty spider bitch.  
AT: sTILL REALLY NASTY,   
AT: sO YEAH,  
TC: yeah.  
AT: gAMZEE, PLEASE DON’T GO EVIL,  
AT: i DON’T WANT TO BELIEVE THERE’S A TYPE THAT BLOOD REVERTS TO, AND I DON’T WANT TO BELIEVE IT OF YOU,  
TC: tav.  
TC: EVIL?  
TC: darlin there ain’t no such thing.  
TC: NO SUCH THING EXISTS IN THE MOTHERFUCKIN LEXICON.  
TC: just noise and god and the blood what goes through you.  
TC: JUST NOISE AND GOD AND DOING WHAT’S UP WHERE YOUR HEART’S AT.  
TC: i don’t got the understand of what you stand for. :o(  
AT: fREEDOM,  
AT: gAMZEE I’M GOING TO SIGN OFF, bUT PLEASE KEEP EVERYTHING I HAVE SAID IN YOUR MIND,  
TC: nowhere else for it to go yo.  
AT: dO YOU REMEMBER THAT i TOLD YOU, THAT I KNEW WE’D SEE EACH OTHER AGAIN SOMEDAY, NO MATTER WHAT,  
AT: i STILL HAVE THE FEELING, THAT ON INSTINCT, IT WAS A GOOD ONE,  
AT: }:o)  
TC: heh.  
TC: HONK.  
TC: you got my nose again bro.  
AT: hEH,  
TC: TAVROS.  
AT: ?,  
TC: ain’t nobody free either.  
TC: terecita could tell you that.  
TC: SHE’S ALL ABOUT WHAT WE’RE BEHOLDEN TO.  
AT: wHY DO YOU SPELL HER NAME THAT WAY,  
TC: man i’m totally in the business of hatehitting that shit.  
AT: uH,  
TC: GETTING REAL GOOD AT IT IS WHAT I AM SAYING.  
TC: ;o)  
TC: FOR REFERENCE IF ANYONE GOT THEIR CURIOUSNESS ON ABOUT ME BEING GOOD AT IT.  
TC: ;o)  
TC: AS I SO RIGHTEOUSLY AM.  
TC: ;o)

  


  
AT: wHOOPS i REALLY OUGHT TO DISCONNECT,  
AT: sO BYE GAMZEE,

**** YOU ARE NO LONGER CHATTING THROUGH xX~*SERKETWARE*~Xx! ****  
**** SUCKS TO 8E YOU!!!!!!!! ****

  


God _damn_ you stuffed up the motherfuckin’ dismount on that one.

  


* * *

  


Tonight’s client says, “I don’t know anything. I’m sorry.”

Pissblood troll, sharp horns. You been working on him an hour already. An hour you have been working now. This is said without guile or cage, without secrecy or a panicked eye: this is said with dogged resolution, like the troll is motherfucking tired out with not knowing anything. Usually by this point your girl gets more and more intense, shivers like the string plucked on a bow, but not this time.

She came back late in the day with her flap cracked from reading, standing in the door and spooning reheated grubloaf to her tongue. Shoulders bowed. Thoughtful with exhaustion. You’d taken to the slime already. No song blared: they’d filled the klaxon cricket with sharp puffs of static, a scour to the canal. You wondered how long they’d keep with the sleep homage. You thought clowns would die that night.

“Got any revelations?” you’d said.

Terezi skinned off her coat. Unbuttoned pant, still forking grubloaf into her maw. “It’s weird that I didn’t think about it before,” she said, mouth full. “It’s his _descendant._ The resurgence of the Cult must be because of the descendant of the Signless Sufferer. What else would rally them?”

“How’d he get into the slurry?”

“Same way we did!” she said. “It makes things easier. The Cult hasn’t been mobilized in sweeps and sweeps and sweeps. Find the flag they are getting excitable about, and your problems are pretty much over.”

You’d said, “You fucking cull him. Job motherfucking done.”

“You fucking cull him, and job motherfucking done,” she agreed. “Shift over.”

Terecita slid in next to you all ginger, like it hurt to touch a thing. Shivered and suffered. You thought she wouldn’t do more than drowse, and you were right, you got the knowing of her signs. When you laid side-by-side in the slime and you told her about Tav, she lay there so still that for a time you’d thought she’d fallen the fuck asleep. 

“It was an awful risk for him,” said your partner, startling you. “A really awful risk. And needless, because -- Vriska sent me a message, too. Hilarious! What a coincidence. Maybe you should have told him not to bother.”

“Reason that shit out.”

“Because we’re in this for life now,” she said, “aren’t we?”

Both of you subsided. Seemed like you were walking down a long corridor to a door, all that walking slow and inexorable, and any other passage got closed off to you both long before. _Don’t go evil,_ your dirtblooded sweetheart had said. It pains the pusher, but sometimes you got to acknowledge that he will never understand.

Right now Terecita sits back on a high stool that she drags in sometimes for interrogations. Sometimes she uses it just to make noise and clatter, but now she’s perched on it and sober-flapped. “Tell me about what happened to the six members of the Mirthful Church, the six who died,” she says.

“I can’t.”

“Tell me who was involved.”

“I can’t. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Tell me, exactly, what your view is on the hemocaste.”

“Look,” says the pissblood, working the only desperate you’ve seen on him all night. “I’m yellow... no psionics worth speaking of. Like, I can bend a spoon, that’s about it. And I’m glad for that. I do bio-electrical work on _Exsanguinator._ They farm me out whenever there’s a deficit, that’s what happens in every bio department, you get shunted around. I’ve got a highblood moirail, he’s a blueblood. I get perks.”

“Thank you for the fascinating insight into the life of a bio-engrimeer,” says your partner, “but that wasn’t answering my question.”

The yellowblood shutters his lids briefly. “It could be worse,” he says, and says it like it indicts him. “That’s what I think. I’ve got a hell of a good life. Could be worse.”

“Has anyone ever spoken to you of hemo-related organised treason, rebellion, terrorism, online support group or amusing point’n’click game?”

“No.”

“Do you know any mutants?”

“What?” he says. “No. Uh -- I know an oliveblood with a tongue fork, but you can hardly see it.”

Terezi rises, and she reaches over to push the button on the wall that calls for the underpriests. It bleats. The client flinches, then acts like he didn’t. This only happens when the client’s an ex-client, and you’re rising, surprised. 

“He is telling the whole and complete truth,” she says impatiently. “I’m not wasting our extremely precious time on someone with no info. Let it show on the transcript that the subject is totally, boringly innocent, and that by the power vested in me by the Church of Mirthful Messiahs I mark him ready for release. Ship him back to _Exsanguinator_ as a dud. Transcript end.”

The troll in the chair exhales so hard and loud it comes out as wheeze. “Oh, my _God_ ,” he says, unsteady.

“Here is my advice to you and your moirail,” she tells him, and begins dragging her stool away. “It could be so much worse. Please continue to keep on the straight’n’narrow and floss your mandibles each day, that’s where the food particles stick.”

You got your suspicions. “Girl -- ”

“Inquisitor,” she says, “I smelled _nothing._ Trust me.”

That’s not what you motherfucking mean, but whatever. She stalks into the fresherblock adjacent, peels off clean glove, heads to the handtrap to get a glass of water. You dog her heels, unsure, and then you hear the underpriests enter the interrogation block. Usually they’d be there with the disinfectant moths. Usually they’d be there with the cull satchel. 

They don’t pause with confuse, to see a live one. They just do what you failed to get your doing on with. You hear the meaty _thwok_ of usual Messiah execution: blade to the nug, nug to the ground.

Terezi blanches. Terezi skids her way back to the block. Terezi stands in the doorway, and you hear her speak: “My client was innocent. I would very much like to know what this means.”

If they’d answered her, you think later, if they’d acknowledged the chlorineblood in the paint, it might’ve been different. If she hadn’t said, “I am afraid I am going to have to charge you with first-degree murder of this troll, and all that entails,” and if she hadn’t got the reply --

“Can’t murder motherfucking cattle, legislacerator.”

You hear her exhale.

“Oh, dear. _Echo Side_ has grown ignorant. The technical definition of _troll_ encompasses all bloods, rust to tyrian, citizenry of the Alternian Empire,” she says. “The more you know! I sentence you both to death. Long live the law.”

They draw on her. You wade in and skullbutt the one until it shatters plate, but she’s already got her rope out and she’s necked the other with it; tossing it over a girder, yanking him to tiptoe, noosing the one you dazed and broke for her counterweight. Shit happens swiftly. Girl knows her cords and her knots; one of the brothers is gargling for air as she tightens the other, heaving the rope, burning her palms, face a mask with iron flap the whole while.

You’ve kind of sat back and let her work, mostly, like why not kick back and let her do her shit, but she doesn’t wait to get your opinon. She ricochets out the door like a motherfucking shell barrage. You end up loping after her, breaking into a run as she sprints down corridors and whacks the knees of other priests to get them out the way. She practically makes herself into pancake as she hits the grille that leads to the old man’s -- god _damn_ it -- central wing, the briefing room, kicks the door open. The slab opens on motion sensor so this is just showboating, but you ain’t going to point this out to her.

The briefing room’s full of Cardinals, the Grand Highblood presiding. Hoods are off. Stain fangs glitter blue in the light. She doesn’t give slightest shit. You wish she wasn’t such a fucking fool that this be the mountain she wants to die on.

“If I find one of my subjects innocent, they are _innocent_ ,” she bellows. “A kill order should not be given! That is patently _illegal!”_

The Grand Highblood peers at her, leaning over in his sitpillar.

“Girl,” he says. “THE _FUCK_ ARE YOU BLEATING ON ABOUT?”

“They killed my subject,” she says. “An innocent. He had nothing to do with any of this. He shouldn’t have been in the chair in the first place. It was awful incompetence on _somebody’s_ part.”

“And you think he ought to have lived,” he says, dreadful and soft.

“Ought!” she says. “ _Must have_. Sir, I would like leave to conduct an investigation as to what orders saw my client killed unlawfully, and appropriate measures taken -- ”

The First Laughsassin’s head bows. He leans on his arms, all a-rope with ancient tendon, mass of follicles falling on his shoulder. You kind of hope your hair doesn’t get to that point of motherfucking misrule. Shit looks untenable. ‘Brothers and sisters,” he says, “EVERYONE GETS THE FUCK OUT IN THE IMMEDIATE, SAVE MY INQUISITION.”

The briefing room clears. All the Comedic College stand, hood themselves, bow to your old man before filing out. They don’t pay you no second glance. The screens at the back of the block flicker off, grey and dead, and all the desks and chairs make the room an abandoned shell. Your ancestor is idly pulling needles and tubes from the shit that’s feeding him in his intravenals, spattering indigo and spattering clear.

At no point does Pyrope shift. She stands ground like a beast protecting a nest. “I want a rule change and a punishment at the highest level,” she says.

“That troll was dead troll walking,” he says. “THAT TROLL WAS A DEAD MOTHERFUCKING TROLL. Dead return from _Echo Side_ and assumed plant, or dead captured by the Cult and forced to recount each instant.”

“I want a rule change and a punishment,” she says. “An innocent troll died on my watch.”

“Or worse,” he says like she hadn’t spoke, “ripe for convert. RIPE FOR THE CONVERSION, TINY PYROPE, ARE YOU _THAT_ FUCKING NAЇVE?”

Terecita grits fang. Her thumbs shake. You never seen her flinch this bad; it’s the dep.

“An innocent troll died,” she says. “Execution of the goons who carried it out is not enough.”

“Let me save you a whole investigation,” he says, and he pulls the last tube out his neck. He stands, blocking screen light, dimming the block, and he ambles like his joints pain him over to where you and she stand. “ _I_ GAVE THE MOTHER FUCKING ORDER, Inquisitor.”

She looks up at him, blind of eye and set of flap. He looks down at her, a massive shamble of muscle and bone. She’s a slip of a thing, next to his bulk and might.

“Sir,” she says evenly, “a legislacerator takes no justification for murder, not from the lowliest scrub drudge to the Grand Highblood.”

With a finger and thumb he could squeeze her head off. The slightest pressure. You know only a little of what he’s capable of, and you know you don’t know what he’s capable of. And there’s her and her fucking fool threats. He reaches down and he takes her long-grown hair very careful in his fingers, tugs it back so that she’s craned to almost the ceiling. Your palms prickle. Your lungs are empty, your eyes blind.

“I ain’t having another fucking Neophyte WITHIN MY KEN,” he says, low and bladed.

And your old man puts his arm around her. Untangles the hair. Draws her close. She smushes into his thigh as he goes _pat pat pat,_ and you kind of let yourself work the wicked exhale just like the pissblood back in the interrogationblock. You don’t need to see your partner’s face to know that her expression’s most probably _the fuck???._

“Your ancestor loved the book,” says the Grand Highblood. “YOUR ANCESTOR LOVED THE DEFINITION AND THE PRECEDENT. Died for it needless. AND I HAVE ASKED MYSELF, OVER AND OVER: WAS _THAT_ MOTHERFUCKING JUSTICE?”

Terezi wriggles out of the hand, some. You step closer, and he motions for you to pull up a chair. You do. This shit would be all cute and convivial if it wasn’t so fucking weird. You sit in it backways as she says, kinda plaintive: “Sir, justice has to stick to a _code._ Deviation from the code means the wielder is rewriting justice as they see fit, at which point it is perhaps no longer justice.”

“You saying there ain’t NO SITUATION WHERE THAT CALL SHOULD BE MADE?”

“No, but -- ”

“She told you,” says your old man, chin jerked youwards, “how my lady Redglare got murdered?”

She hasn’t. What you talk about in regard to your ancestors together is the minimal. You got little interest in how often your ancestors touched a butt. 

“She was killed at the trial of Spinneret Mindfang,” says your partner, and he says, “YES. We held that motherfucking sea harpy for nights and nights. THAT TROLL WAS THE BANE OF AN EMPIRE. She was the cause of some wicked-ass discord amongst us, just as now. But my lady said they had come too far for a KNIFE TO THE PIPE OR A SNAP TO THE STEM.”

Your old man’s eyes close, some. “Come too far,” he echoes softly. “Done and seen too much. The end of her career... end of a long pilgrimage for her. FOOTSORE AND TRAVEL-WEARY. Ran her down across oceans and continents, backstreets and thoroughfares. Tireless and lonesome. TIRELESS, AND MOST RIGHTEOUSLY ALONE.”

You wonder what it would have been like, back in the age of the city. When your civilization was barely civilize. Your old man’s hand span pats down on your partner’s shoulder again, _pat pat,_ and she grimaces some.

“But it would have been rendered meaningless if she hadn’t,” she says. “Coming all that way to bring a criminal to justice, and then _justice_ being -- a knife to the pipe. Or a snap to the stem. The Neophyte would have travelled to bring her to judgement, not kill her. And I don’t understand what this has to do with my dead troll.”

“THE GREATER MOTHER FUCKING GOOD,” he says. “What happened next outweighed the pain of not carrying her to trial. She knew the danger of letting the GOD DAMNED MARQUISE BREATHE TO SEE FRESH AIR. She knew the danger, and yet.”

“Because it was the law.”

“Fuck the law,” you say, “in that case, ought to not been the law.”

“ _Ignoratio elenchi,_ ” she says, and you recognise the middle Alternian. “Irrelevant conclusion. It was _not_ the law, and the Neophyte knew it.”

“I ain’t arguing that it should have been law,” says your old man, and his oculars spark. His voice is tight. “I ARGUE THAT IT DIDN’T MATTER ONE MOTHERFUCKING WHIT. I argue the law did not serve her. I argue that -- that _FUCKING NIGHT_ \-- Mindfang cut my true love down. Broke her chains. Turned the mob with her vision eightfold, that was her trick. Give her a handful of shitbloods and she would have the mastery of them. With a court full of trolls and a gallows rope -- for the want of a knife to the pipe and a snap to the stem -- 

“There wasn’t dignity in it, children. MY LADY DIED LIKE A MOTHERFUCKING **CULL**.”

  


  
There is no pain in his wrinkled-ass features. Just a curious loss. There is a loss in him. An empty part he is confused at, like waking up without an arm or a spleen or some shit. “Twenty sweeps I had her,” he says vaguely, “twenty sweeps... merest motherfucking blink of an ocular.”

Twenty sweeps seems like a lifetime. You don’t fathom such kinds of wicked chronology. You think about twenty sweeps with Karkat and it’s a daydream. You think about twenty sweeps with Terezi and it’s a rope collar. 

“Did you know,” says your old man, all a-smile now, “that she refused me for three sweeps, courting her? ALL UP AND MAKING NOISE AT ME THAT IT WAS WICKED INAPPROPRIATE. Woman was always starched with propriety. THE WOMAN GOT SO SALTY ABOUT PROFESSIONALISM.”

Didn’t pass that shit on to Terezi. Terezi lives a pants optional lifestyle and licks grub mayo off her elbows. It’s shit-tent clowncars. 

“Sir,” says your legislacerator, “what would have been the nonsense in letting the troll live?”

“A living troll is a chaos variable,” says the Grand Highblood. “KNIFE TO THE PIPE. Snap to the stem. Until we have the Cult on the run, there is NO MOTHERFUCKING VARIABLE TO BE HAD. No end untied. I will not suffer a threat to live. A THREAT I WILL NOT FUCKING SUFFER.”

“Careless murdering will drive more trolls to the Cult, I think,” she says, “than carelessly not murdering.”

Your old man says, “Then ain’t that incentive for you to END THEM ALL THE QUICKER?”

Death and vengeance preys on your mind. You consider it. It’s why you say, “That’s crazy-ass bullshit, no cunning to it,” without thinking much. “No long-term strategy, the ease kill. NO LONG-TERM STRATEGY AT ALL.”

Terezi looks at you with the queer, shitty expression she throws when you said a thing that isn’t feral. Makes you want to step on her foot always. The Grand Highblood turns his rheum eye toward you. You remember how he looked when you said you disliked the fight and the cull, and for a moment you anticipate his backhand; the claws on him, in your soft parts. A bead of his fear runs down your spine. But then he says, “I say again. Ain’t that incentive for you to END THEM _ALL THE QUICKER?”_

Terecita says, “Sir. can you confirm existence of the Sufferer’s descendant?”

Now his eye is turned toward her. His hand comes up and he pats the back of her skull again. His palm is larger than her whole nug. “Aha,” he says, in deep satisfaction. “THE GIRL HAS A CELL IN HER BRAIN. No confirmation, little sister, barring how you got the confirm of it: INFERENCE AND SUSPICION. But he lives. He is reborn. I can MOTHERFUCKING TASTE THE SHADOW OF HIS STEP UPON THE UNIVERSE.”

You don’t like how she gets celebrated like she’s the master of all deduction. She might be better at that shit than you, but he’s _your_ ancestor first, your flesh and blood and gristle. More of him got into your cells than into hers. You say, “So he’s part of our cohort.”

That unnerves her. “What -- ”

“Makes sense,” you say, “DON’T IT? Summoner born. Mindfang born. You born, me born, Fishnook born. That princess born. ALL FROM THE SAME CLUTCH, YOU MOTHER FUCKING DIG? Just find the symbolhight, find the sign name.”

“Gamzee, you nincompoop, he’ll have been hidden by the Cult if he’s already off-spectrum -- ”

“They would have given him new sign name,” says the Grand Highblood. “HELL, THEY EVEN WOULD HAVE SMUGGLED HIM A FUCKING LUSUS. No lusus born would’ve picked up a hue skew unless it had been engineered beforehand. FIRST TIME AROUND, A DOLOROUS NUN PICKED HIM UP AND FLED FOR HER MISERABLE MOTHER FUCKING LIFE. No, children.”

“Sir,” you say, “would you know him if you GOT YOUR SOCKETS FULL OF HIM?”

“In a dark room, my pious gangsters,” he says. “In a blind light would I know him.”

Terezi says, “What did he look like?”

By the dip into quiet you assume he had no features to distinguish, except high pants. Your old man walks away from you both and eases himself back down on his sitpillar, takes his needles and jams them indifferent into his veins as though the pain has no consequence. He rests his huge head and riotous wig against the board, and lets out a long _hmmm_ in thought.

Then he just says, “Nubby.”

Well, that ain’t a motherfucking help.

“Children,” he says, as you both rise to take your leave. “DO YOU GOT THE RECOLLECT ON of how I cruel said I’d have your asses, if you did not carry this out? HOW I MOST CALLOUSLY TALKED OF YOUR ENDS AND YOUR DEATHS, if you did not find me my perpetrator?”

“Oh, yes,” says your girl.

“Well,” says your old man gently, “I STILL MEANT EVERY SINGULAR FUCKING **WORD.”**

All back through the dark corridors, your girl holds herself like a claw trap. As time goes by, this is less like claw trap and more like someone holding themselves as extreme indigestion, and when you get back to your rec atrium she dissolves. Terecita sits in her shirt sleeves and her silence as you both eat lunchmeal. She does not bother to steal your frazzle nor your choicest crickets. She sits there looking like a long streak of world end, until you say, “It wasn’t your **_FUCKING FAULT,_** already.”

“This is new,” she says. “You have found a way to blame most things on me, like space acne. And aphid milk spoilage.”

“Worst part is your levity,” you say, “THE FALSE-ASS BRAVADO. The cowardice of a chuckle. Fuck you. He died. That’s the end of the song. LAST NOTE HAS DIED AND GONE THE HELL AWAY TO DARK PLACES. Dwelling on it is the sad-sack province of dipshits and bumblefucks.”

Her flap smiles slight and wan.

“Kismesis is not the comfort quadrant,” says Terecita.

“Your ass ain’t the comfort quadrant either.”

She says, quite quietly: “Thank you, Mr. Huckleberry.”

Maybe it’s that, that spills you. The cruelty of her thanks. She knows how to slide in the blade. As she measures her length on the rest platform, you use up the rest of lunchbreak to pull out your husktop and put it on the table. Doing this is somehow confession, of late. This act is a penance act. The silence doesn’t harm you as much as it used to. The silence does not harm like it used. You are hardly feeling any motherfucking thing at all.

  
\-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] is an idle troll! --  


TC: that latest troll matt mcconaughey film.  
TC: TEREZI AND I JUST WATCHED IT.  
TC: IT WAS ENJOYABLE.  
TC: ENJOYMENT WAS HAD BY ONE AND ALL YO.  
TC: WHILE WATCHING THIS FILM WHAT TROLL MATT MCCONAUGHEY WAS IN.  
TC: ok enough of that noise.  
TC: how the fuck does troll matt mcconaughey even know who a troll matt mcconaughey to be.  
TC: how’s it work, even.  
TC: KAR DEAR I GOT TO BE REAL WITH YOU.  
TC: more crunch time coming, more crunch time gone.  
TC: wouldn’t up and call this emergency unless i had to rap with you.  
TC: maybe we live and maybe we don’t.  
TC: PYROPE AND I BEEN MAD ALL ABOUT THE INQUISITION BUSINESS, YOU KNOW?  
TC: could end it all if we just found answers to our fucking questions.  
TC: COULD ALL END IF WE KNEW THE WHYS AND WHEREFORES OF THE QUESTIONS WE GOT.  
TC: fucking cultists in our shit, dowding shit up.  
TC: who killed the six brethren.  
TC: WHO IS THE DESCENDANT OF THE SUFFERING CULTIST.  
TC: HOW WIDE’S HIS NECK FOR THE BLADE OF OUR AXE YO.  
TC: what hue do his veins ooze.  
TC: what spill will his sockets make.  
TC: THIS SHIT IS WASTING HER IF YOU GOT ME ON THAT ONE.  
TC: THIS SHIT IS SHAKING HER OUT THE PACKET AND NOT LEAVING ANY BEHIND.  
TC: AND I WOULDN’T GIVE NO FUCK EXCEPTING THAT THERE BE NO GIRL LEFT TO GIVE.  
TC: she and me have skinny fight left in us for each other.  
TC: NO SQUABBLE AND NO BEDEVILMENT, IT SUCKS.  
TC: that’s the stress sitch at the mo.  
TC: THOUGH UH.  
TC: i’ll get expanse on that later.  
TC: just you avoid all priests and prophecy do you hear me.  
TC: you avoid all this cultist business and keep on wicked downlows.  
TC: they just nab anyone who looks even a little likely.  
TC: i don’t want you nabbed yo.  
TC: :o(  
TC: I AM GOING TO COME FOR YOU WHEN ALL THIS TROUBLE BE DONE.  
TC: not to be parted.  
TC: I MOTHERFUCKING SWEAR TO YOU.  
TC: i swear.  
TC: THAT NEITHER DEATH NOR LIFE NOR ANGELS NOR RULERS NOR THINGS PRESENT NOR SHIT TO COME NOR POWERS NOR HEIGHT NOR DEPTH NOR AUGHT ELSE IN ALL CREATION WILL SEPARATE ME FROM THE TRUE BANGIN LOVE OF YOU.

Your girl don’t conk out then, not on lunchbreak. Not with two more interrogations to sit through. The next shitters give you ships and names of trolls who are all maybes and vagues, then die. Usual bullshit. Not until the last transcript gets signed that day does Terezi deign to conk, but after that she goes horizontal. She rests her nug next to her dinner shellac’n’cheese and just falls the fuck asleep. 

This lets you eat your own shellac’n’cheese in wicked peace, which you enjoy, and you also eat the shit out of hers, which you enjoy. This domestic fuckery is hosed up by the crackle of the klaxon. It is noised untoward by the priest on sleep dep duty, busy in some block of the ship feeding metal tacks into a blender. It’s in this way you take your club out your sylladex and you aggrieve the klaxon cricket. It takes you a couple secs to beat it into the wall socket and splatter its wire interiors everywhere, slop and chipset. It is a religious offence to interrupt the ritual. You don’t give one single

SOLITARY

motherfuck.

Legislacerator sleeps on, unpurpled of ocular, untrembling of hand.

That morning you end up carrying her to cupe, light in your arms as the matchstick bones of a wiggler. Light as she was the first time you ever tossed her across the room. When you unbutton her coat she grumbles. When you tug off her boots she growls. You even scrape off her paint, wiping off yours with a quick prayer in the direction to the saint whose day it is, Saint Championshit Vampiro. Can’t get uncivilized, even at times like this.

When you finally toss her in the slime she curls up meek and mild, in slumber the whole motherfucking time. When the green envelops her she only gets one mutter on with, “Vriska, too cold,” before falling the fuck back asleep.

Heh. You both got to get back to basics. This time constraint is working shit on your sex life. Both of you keep falling asleep midway or doing it in supply cells. Maybe now she’ll have more energy to fixate haterade on you. You’ll aggress tomorrow, you decide, both of you can aggrieve to the pusher’s content. It’ll feel easier if you take the time out to whale on each other. Bring the blood to the skin, the bruise and contuse. Beat the shit out of each other.

Girl is too comatosed to hear your husk chirp, and to be honest it startles the shit out the bowel:

\-- CONNECTING TO SECURE SERVER --

  


  


\-- CONNECTING -- CONNECTING --

  


  


\-- FOUND CONNECTION --

  
\-- twinArmageddons [TA] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC]! --  


TA: thank2 for the head2-up. operatiion gtfo wiill now commence.  
TC: you get the fuck off instantaneously pissbag.  
TC: THIS IS PRIVATE SHIT AND NO PISSBAGS ALLOWED.  
TC: THIS IS BETWEEN ME AND MY MOIRAIL WHAT YOU OUGHT TO PUT ON.  
TC: all between him and all between me.  
TC: NOT INVOLVING SOME MOTHERFUCKING MASQUERADE IN HIS NAME BY SOME TAGWEARING DATA SUCKER.  
TA: ii wa2 beiing 2iincere, but whatever. iit’2 not liike the clo2er you get two hiim the better ii fuckiing 2leep.   
TC: you dropping all pretense boy.  
TC: ARE YOU DROPPING THIS THIN-ASS PRETENSE.  
TC: that you ain’t getting between he and me.  
TC: don’t you know it’s a terrible ill.  
TC: GETTIN BETWEEN A MAN AND HIS PALEMATE.  
TA: ii hate two tell you thii2, but ii have never pretended you were anythiing other than a piile of clown turd.  
TA: iif you are a2kiing me two be even le22 2ubtle than before, iit’2 your corp2e party.  
TA: let’2 drop the preten2e 2o hard i gue22. the whole club ju2t expiired.  
TA: you know iif you had any pale feeliing2 for kk, really pale, you’d get your2elf a2 far away from hiim a2 po22iible, then you’d get a liittle further.  
TA: then you’d ki22 an aiirlock.  
TA: thankfully the one now makiing choiice2 ii2n’t you or hiim. church tiip-off taken. ii am goiing iinto armageddon mode.  
TA: he won’t 2ee rea2on when iit come2 two you becau2e you were wriiggler 2weetheart2, or what the fuck. but the truth ii2 becomiing 2o obviiou2 iit ha2 two get through hii2 thiick pan.  
TC: truth being.  
TA: you are bad new2.  
TA: you won the wor2t new2 award a whiile back, crowd2 gathered around two 2ee how 2hiitty new2 could po22iibly get and were amazed.  
TA: ii make a better moiiraiil for hiim than you do and that ii2 fuckiing 2ayiing 2omethiing.  
TC: I LONG GOT MY SUSPECT ON THAT JEALOUSY WAS WHERE YOU WERE AT.  
TC: long thought jealousy was where this was up and at bro.  
TC: JEALOUSY IS SUCH A SAD STATE OF MOTHERFUCKING AFFAIR.  
TA: you’re a fuckiing IINQUII2IITOR FOR THE CHURCH OF EVIIL, YOU 2HIIT-PROPELLED CLOWN DUMP.  
TA: you unbeliievable douche. why would you ever de2erve to be around hiim, why would you ever de2erve two be around anyone. iit’2 a joke what you thiink you have the riight two do.  
TA: only liike every other joke you ever made iit wa2 2hiit.  
TC: i got no hard feeling up in this bitch.  
TC: NO HARD FEELING.   
TC: no soft feeling.  
TC: NO FEELING AT ALL.  
TC: ain’t no fact or truth in this universe other than him loving me, you dig.  
TC: NO OTHER GOSPEL.  
TA: that ii2 very cute and 2entiimental. iit ii2 even funniier iif you con2iider that you are an amoral 2hiitlord, hiigh heiir two 2hiit ii2land.  
TC: loving me and all strenuous not loving you.  
TC: YOU PRE-CORPSE MOTHERFUCKER.  
TA: ii’m goiing, gz.  
TA: and ii am takiing hiim wiith me, and iif ii wa2 a prayiing troll ii would be prayiing that we never heard your name agaiin.  
TA: thankfully reliigiion ii2 the proviince of wiiggler2 wiith pupal development ii22ue2.   
TC: AND WHERE THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU GO WITH WHAT IS MINE.  
TA: iinto the wiilderne22.   
TC: yo.  
TC: brother.  
TC: THERE IS NO WILDERNESS, YOU DUMB LOWBLOOD TOOL.  
TA: ehehehe. you have no iidea.  
TC: hahahaha.  
TC: HA HA HA HA.  
TC: honk.  
TC: YOU CAN’T FRIGHTEN ME.  
TC: THE FEAR GOT ALREADY PUT IN ME, FOOL.  
TC: you can’t frighten me.  
TC: i got the disbelieves unless it comes from his own mouth.  
TC: DO YOU READ ME.  
TA: what diid you ever even do for him other than two make hiim worry. why am ii goiing two 2pend my liife beiing 2econd diiamond fiiddle two a 2hiity clown.  
TA: twiice. not even once. twiice. iironiic ii gue22.  
TA: poiint beiing, ii’ve been piickiing up after you. 2eem2 liike kk ii2n’t gettiing any comfort from your quarter.   
TA: then agaiin iit’2 not liike you’d be a comfort even iif you were riight there.  
TC: urineblood.  
TC: YOU OUT TO VEX OR DISMAY?  
TC: is the vexatious and dismaying your province now.  
TC: SOUNDS LIKE YOU GOT SOME MOTHER FUCKING PERSONAL PROBLEMS.  
TC: i’m sorry.  
TC: SORRY THAT WHEN YOU DIE I WILL HAVE TO PUT UP WITH NEEDLESS BITCH TEARS OVER YOUR CARCASS.  
TA: ii’m not 2cared of you. you’re liike the mo2t boriing troll in the uniiver2e. iif mother goto fucker. do mother fucker loop untiil ii go comato2e.  
TA: only fear ii2 that when tiime come2 two protect hiim he won’t know how two protect hii2 2tupiid fuckiing ugly face from you.  
TC: AND WHY WOULD HE GET NEED OF PROTECTION FROM ME.  
TC: WHY WOULD A FOLLICLE ON HIS CAP NEED PROTECTION FROM ME.  
TA: go fuck your2elf.  
TA: ii know how thii2 one end2. you’ll have hii2 blood on your hand2 and you won’t even care.  
TC: TAKE IT BACK.  
TC: TAKE IT MOTHER FUCKING BACK YOU MOTHER FUCKING SHIT.  
TA: hey.  
TA: iit’2 cool.  
TA: thii2 game ii2 goiing two end up wiith you dead, diid you know that?  
TA: dead a2 a door2naiil.  
TC: heh.  
TC: HEH.  
TC: ha ha.  
TC: THAT’S A GOOD ONE.  
TC: brought a smile to the flap. :o)  
TC: so in response i promise.  
TC: I WILL FIND YOU WHEREVER YOU SO DRAG HIM YOU GODLESS SUNBLOOD.  
TA: and what, kiill me?  
TC: nah.  
TC: i’ll take him away from you, how’s that sound.  
TC: AND THEN I AM GOING TO MAKE IT A SURETY THAT AT THAT POINT.  
TC: THAT LONG AWAITED POINT.  
TC: that most carnival of points.  
TC: YOU WILL NEVER MOTHERFUCKING KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE TO NOT BE MOTHERFUCKING AFRAID.  
TA: ii’ve never known that two begiin wiith, fucker.  
TC: YOU’VE NEVER KNOWN SHIT.  
TC: ALK*******&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&  
TC: uh fuck, xcus tht.  
TC: trzi’s rm just ll up nd lbowd the bord.  
TC: w shit now a coupl kys won’t typ.  
TC: how do you up nd go bout gtting sopor off mchin.   
TC: GOD DMN.  
TA: are you fuckiing kiiddiing, hold iit up2iide down.  
TA: iif you let that 2tuff get under the ca2iing2 you are ba2iically boned.  
TC: not gtting ny mothrfuckin bttr. :o(  
TA: oh my god, how do you even u2e the gaper wiithout an FAQ.  
TA: gz you 2crape iit, 2opor come2 out a2 a contiinuou2 blob.  
TC: OK.  
TA: diid iit all come out, look for re2iidue2.  
TC: YEAH THE SHIT IS OUT IN ENTIRETY.  
TC: uh look, that crashed my train of thought there.  
TC: SAD ABANDONED FUCKING CLOWN TRAIN OF THOUGHT CRASHED AND BURNED REGARDING YOUR DEMISE.  
TC: what were we on about. :o?  
TA: two la2t poiint2 two recap.  
TA: fiir2t poiint, have a horriible abbreviiated liife ruiiniing other people’2, and iif ii ever meet you face two face ii am goiing two 2hove your anatomy up your own nook iin a way that make2 you one big mobiiu2 loop.  
TA: 2econd poiint, 2TOP CHATTIING IIN THE RECUPERACOON, THAT II2 THE LEADIING CAU2E OF HARDWARE DAMAGE IIN PER2ONAL HU2KWARE2.  
TA: yeah. ii am goiing two leave you now, forever.  
TC: captor.  
TC: i am motherfuckin coming for him.  
TC: and for your sins i am motherfuckin coming for you.  
TA: en garde, niitwiit.

  
\-- twinArmageddons [TA] has blocked terminallyCapricious [TC]! --  


  


* * *

  


  
“I don’t know what you want,” says tonight’s client. “I don’t know what you want, I don’t know what you want, I don’t know what you _want!”_

Your client’s saying, “I’ve got nothing -- done nothing.” 

“Nobody here believes that,” says the legislacerator, “and especially not you, I am afraid.”

Last night your hatesponge and woe-absorber slept in the slime like dead baby. You didn’t wake her. You didn’t unsettle. In the evening she got up all perk, all gleam, all whistling in the trap; you didn’t tell her motherfucking aught about what went on the day previous. You both got your secrets. 

Today she’s in fine fettle. Today the girl is in fine motherfucking form. You remember shit she’s schooled you on, shit you admit she knows up and down: _never lead the witness. Never begin with specifics! If you do, they will tailor their story; if you don’t, they will begin singing like sweet chirpbeasts over what they think you do want. What they think you want is the most interesting part._

“I ain’t never liked a reticent troll,” you say. Guy’s throat swallows hard against your wrist. “A TROLL’S RETICENCE IS NOT MY FUCKING FAVOURITE.”

“I’ve got nothing to tell you, if you’d only say what you wanted -- ”

“Everyone has something to tell us,” says Terezi. “And you most of all, isn’t that correct?”

Both of you should’ve taken break for lunch, but you ate a considerable breakfast and figured it was okay. She’s steaming along nice. Once you’re on a roll, ain’t neither of you like to break that roll. That’s professionalism. That’s motherfucking devotion. It’s gonna be your masks they slap up in the lobbyblock with SUBJUGGLATOR OF THE MONTH and a voucher for a free meat cylinder.

“I don’t know what you want,” he repeats doggedly. His fangs chatter. His stem contracts. “I’m a code banalyst on the _Imperator_ \-- I just work in a cubicle cell -- oh my God! I took a couple pens once! I was going to give them right back, I just had one in my pocket and I was already off-shift, for real! I’m sorry!”

You let your arm go slack. Their breath against your arm gets itself all moist. You lean your nug down and you say, quiet as a motherfucking grub scurry, “You want to get schooled on a fun fact here?”

“I don’t know?”

“Yeah, you want to get schooled,” you say. You get your mouth near their shell. “You want a word to the wise. You want a parable to the addle. You wanna get schooled on how my partner can smell _the shit stink of your motherfucking dishonesty, fool.”_

Giving Terezi a gander shows that her expression is subtle and smiley. Partner likes smelling you at work. Good sign. Ain’t many moments of the night where she’ll deign to get her fucking proud on of you, but when she condescends it makes you want her slap her through the mouth. Makes you want to touch her blood-untidy hair. You don’t, though, on account of you’re both wired and don’t want some transcribing underpriest to get the rude details of your private life. 

The troll hangs his head against your arm. You’ve been working on him for an hour now, and he’s not even going so far as to get his bite on. Started out all noise, but now he’s just sad and blear. Your legislacerator says softly: “Have you ever been fishing, Mr. Pekeio? Did you have a little lawnring near the water, a lusus who liked air bladders to snack on?”

It discombobulates. “I -- I was in a hivestem -- ”

“Inquisitor Makara lived by the sea,” she says. “I was in the woods. I used to fish in the creek with pins and string. I never caught anything but spratapusses. Did you, Inquisitor?”

“Yeah,” you say, “only I felt real motherfuckin’ sorry for the fish.”

“Some people say it’s good to let the small ones go,” says your girl. “Maybe, well. I don’t know.”

“I did _nothing wrong!”_

You misspoke. Still some fight in him, now he’s tipped off-balance. You drop your arm and let his chinbone loll to his chest. “Don’t sound like did nothing to me,” you say, “ain’t got a similar amount of SYLLABLES IN IT,” and you bounce his backskull off the chair. 

“I did nothing wrong,” he says doggedly, “I did nothing wrong, please,” and you bounce his backskull again ‘til Terezi twitches her head in no. You whip her the middle finger, but you back the fuck off like you’re whipped, like she’s in charge of you. There is a time for pain and a time for talk. This too is part of the act.

Your partner says, “How long were you stationed aboard the _Imperator?”_

“You already asked me -- ”

“Indulge me again, Code Banalyst Pekeio,” says Terezi.

“I got transferred there a half-sweep back -- I don’t know -- ”

“And you were stationed previously aboard the _Exsanguinator?_ As a systems operator, no less!”

You lean against the wall. His oculars get their flick on between you and her. Terecita has started her pace, pace, pace across the interrogationblock. Her pacing’s brought some of them to tears. “Yeah, I mean -- why does it matter?”

“The _Exsanguinator_ is a big Fleet ship,” she says, “and the _Imperator_ is just some smelly shock-troop support vessel. From sys ops to a mere code ookbeast? Good grief! I would have been gutted. Metaphorically, not literally. Were you bad at it?”

“No?” he says, a little dazed. “No, I’m qualified to do operations up to a massacre-class warship. Why is this about my employment history?”

“Artists,” says Terezi. “Coders. Technicians. Security personnel! I do not think we are talking to a random crop of miscreants, job-wise. Code Banalyst, I want to understand.”

“I don’t know what you want,” says the troll, ragged. “I don’t understand all these questions, and if you’re going to do something to me, Inquisitor, you can -- you can do something to me, I don’t care, I’m ready.”

You raise brow at your legislacerator. When she gives no twitch, you push off the wall and drop down to your haunches in front of the chair. Guy looks at you with drear noncomprehension. You give him a friendly grin. He fucking shudders. You give it to him more toothsomely, and you say, “You tired, pus-blood?”

Troll makes no noise. You say, “You full up with the WICKED EXHAUST?” and you touch his shin. He flinches away. You learnt now that the trick is to begin low and slow with the miasma, let your chucklevoodoo begin as a knot in his digestive sac and a disturb to his pan. It ain’t hornscrews, but it has its place so long as you don’t do it too much at once. She’s warned you to ease: “You make me forget what _I’m_ doing, when you go too hard,” she’s said, but that’s the point now, ain’t it?

The jitter becomes a flutter. The flutter becomes a fear. The voodoo anxieties run through him until you see his fangs begin to grind against each other, until his spectacles hang at the tip of his nose. You fancy you can hear his heart. It will thump in his chest ‘til all he hears is rhythms, until the pulse that runs through his shitty yellow aural canals is a drum and a disturbance. You do it so softly. You only stop when he sobs.

“You burnt their hands off first,” you say. It’s a risk. “You BURNT off their MOTHER FUCKING _MITTS_ AS THEY MOTHERFUCKING _WATCHED.”_

“That wasn’t me!” he shrills. “It wasn’t even a mission, we didn’t want that to happen!”

Hooked.

You unbend and lift. You give Terecita a smirk, let her know you got the point this time, and you dust yourself off to show her yeah, you’re a motherfucking winner, congratulations to you. She can get her work on doing the clean-up. Guy’s crying his glutes off now; what a loser. She waggles her brows at you and moves on in, cane clattering toward him as she stands by his chair. “Tell me your job aboard the _Imperator,_ ” she says. He keeps sobbing. “Tell me who you were working under.”

“W-was just a coder, nothing else -- ”

“Tell me what you were doing, Mr. Pekeio,” she says. “Hurt can still come. Hurt can come in terrible amounts. I can grant you leniency, if you tell me the story of the six dead trolls and your coding mystery.”

“They don’t tell you the names -- ”

“Horseshit,” you say. “THAT’S A FUCKING LOAD. AIN’T HOW YOU ALL WORK, YOU DON’T DO CLINICAL.”

“No!” he says again, half-garble. “No, it’s not how we work! I won’t tell you! It doesn’t matter now, nothing -- it doesn’t matter -- you won’t find anything, _Imperator’s_ a junk ship -- oh, God -- ”

Your legislacerator waves you off. Now it’s her sinking to her skinny knees in front of the yellowblood, fat tears rolling down his cheeks. She speaks all soft and quiet. “Please,” she says. “Mr. Pekeio. This is just you and I talking. Nobody but you and me. You’ve all organised, haven’t you? That’s why it’s all tech workers and bureaucretins. What would you be coding, though? What would you be hiding?”

“The resurrection,” says the troll. 

“And what would that be?”

No answer. 

“Or _who?”_

No answer, but he sighs.

She waits. His lids slide down, his shoulders bunch up. Terezi says gently, “I need names,” but he says, “There are no names! That’s it! That’s the thing! You don’t understand, I don’t care, there’s nothing you can do to me. There’s nothing you can do.”

“Mr. Pekeio,” says your partner, “I do not want you to find out the extent of how very wrong you are.”

You cross over behind him. You sift one hand through his hair, stilling his nug when he tries to jerk it back. You let your claws prick his scalp. This time the chucklevoodoo is a shot of primal right to his brainpan, and all his muscles seize in chorus. Doesn’t go into shock, though, just screams: mustardblood puts up a good fight. Wouldn’t have expected it from a chair-sitting code yawner. “Everything you ever got taught is wrong,” he chatters. “Everything we ever got taught -- was -- wrong -- ”

“Names,” says Terezi. “Who. I want the who.”

“You can’t -- find -- us -- when you put your hackers and your -- psionics into cages, you underestimate -- not a mind slave -- I’m free, I was always -- ”

“Please,” she says. Her voice is a coax. Like she’s encouraging a baby chirpbeast to fly, alight down on her motherfucking finger. She bounces up from her kneel and leans in, cupping her long hands over the head of that stupid-ass dragon cane. “Just a little more.”

“ -- thirteen firewalls -- can’t even pinpoint it on a scanner, we jammed...”

You say, “Jammed the fuck what.”

“Jammed what,” she echoes, “what did you jam,” and she gives you the sign for a little more juice. You fill him with gutfear. He is affrighted. You ain’t never filled someone up like you’re ramming him now. A thin line of dribble comes out his flap and his knuckles are fucking yellow with it. Troll’s stuttering -- “jammed -- we jammed -- whole team of us -- we jammed -- I’m glad -- do it again -- we swear -- jammed -- just -- a -- hacker -- ”

“Again,” says your partner. “I want his name. We’re so close.”

You go again.

“ -- just a hacker -- nobody ever -- didn’t hurt any -- not like -- he wouldn’t want -- Captor says -- Captor says -- ”

Terezi whips out her sword and she slits the troll’s throat. 

Both of you stare at the cooling stiff. In that room the silence is drippy and absolute.

“Let it show on the transcript,” she says, working not one tremble, “that the subject admitted earlier participation in the Cult of the Signless Sufferer and was executed without needing admission of guilt or verbal intent. By the power vested in me by the Church of the Mirthful Messiahs, I retroactively sentence Systems Banalyst Hinvie Pekeio to death.”

Your girl keeps mopping her mouth. Your girl keeps smearing her paint. Your girl has grubby mustard on her digits. Her mop turns into a scrub turns into a motherfucking full-blown itch. When she buries her nug in her claws and her lips start twitch, you get ringside seats to Terezi Pyrope totally losing her shit.

  


* * *

\-- CONNECTING TO SERVER --

\-- CONNECTING -- CONNECTING --

TC: you had to know.  
TC: YOU HAD TO  
TC: mother  
TC: FUCKING  
TC: know.  
TC: AND BY WHAT MEANS DID YOU GET THIS HAVING BEING KNOWING ON.  
TC: oh bro.  
TC: OH BLOOD OF MY PUSHER.  
TC: oh syrup of my faygo.  
TC: i trusted you to be real with where your heart’s up and at, you know?  
TC: TRUSTED YOU TO KEEP THIS IN THE MOST BITCHTITS OF REALITIES.  
TC: best of all possible worlds.  
TC: AND AS FOR THE SNAKEBEAST IN YOUR GRASS.  
TC: AND AS FOR IT LETTING OUT ALL KINDS OF MOTHERFUCKING HISS.  
TC: well.  
TC: i guess it be letting out all kinds of hi22.  
TC: SCHOOLFEED ME, BROTHER.  
TC: ain’t no knowing i desire other than the understanding, you get?  
TC: I AM PAINED WITH IGNORANCE IS ALL.  
TC: i am ignorant and pained is all.  
TC: been scoffing denial pie.  
TC: ALL SOFT WITH LOOKING OTHER WAYS.  
TC: fuckin dippy with denying.  
TC: HAS HE GOT THAT MOTHER FUCKING SYMBOL ON HIS MOTHERFUCKING BODY?  
TC: would you know what it motherfucking meant.  
TC: OR IS THAT THE PUNCHLINE.  
TC: you being a patsy?  
TC: YOU BEING THE OLD LOYAL LUMP OF FUCK.  
TC: but don’t you know.  
TC: DON’T YOU EVEN KNOW.  
TC: i’ll forgive you.  
TC: with bloody flap i forgive you.  
TC: I WILL ALWAYS MOTHER FUCKING FORGIVE YOU THESE TRESPASSES.  
TC: DON’T YOU GET THE TRUTH I GOT ON FORGIVENESS?  
TC: but what can i do.  
TC: what would i do.  
TC: who am i to judge. :o?  
TC: WHO AM I BUT THE JUDGE.  
TC: ONLY ONE OF TWO ALL-SEEING ALL-DANCING ALL-FUCKING MOTHERFUCKING JUDGES.  
TC: honk.  
TC: HONK.  
TC: oh love.  
TC: WHAT’S TO BECOME OF US. :o(

  


\-- CONNECTION FAILED --

  


* * *

  


“There ain’t going to be more than one motherfucking Captor,” you say.

Back in the block. You got full ringside seats to Terezi Pyrope’s breakdown. You got audience participation. No time for more than brief meltdown: no time to hogtie her to a pipe, filter slime into her hollow. But the girl evinces no sob nor weeps a weep: moment you’re out the fresherblock and back in the atrium she gets you on lockdown. She whips out her husktop. She claws into the database like her digits are guns, like each word is a bullet when there is no meat for them to hit into. 

You still find a little magic in her pain. You want to fold up her clutching shoulders and crunch her into a different shape. Make her look at you. Make her hear your rhyme and reason. 

“Don’t talk to me,” Terecita says steadily, “unless it is to talk plans.”

“Oh, plans,” you say. “Hark at the girl. THE GIRL WANTS TO TALK PLANS. The girl wants to talk plans after she SLIT THE WITNESS FROM EAR TO EAR. The girl wants to put the dead hoofbeasts back in the stable. The GIRL WANTS _MIRACLES.”_

“What was I meant to do, let him keep implicating? Grow an imagination! Grow two! Gamzee, do you know what he might have started saying?”

“Let him implicate,” you say, “let him implicate the wicked. Let him get his implicate on. Let him froth up all kinds of implication, ain’t that what we here for?”

“Gamzee,” she says sadly, “you are a fool.”

  


  
Sollux Captor is an ugly-ass unfortunate. Just some skinny piece of snaggletooth, is all, when you’d expected bigger and meatier and meaner. Just a brain with a stick jabbed through.

Sitting there she is wound so tight she could explode. Keeps losing her track, looking at her hands, sucking for breath like her sponges won’t fill. The shadows beneath her eyes are terrible shadows. All the sleep she got previous has been used up like a breath underwater, gone in a trice. This is her pushed to the beautiful precipice. 

“Look at his dumb hair,” she says. “It gets me every time.” For a moment you get the ugly wonder that she might leak.

“Looks like a douchebag.”

“I know,” says Terezi, and her shoulders clutch so that you think her spine might pop out like a splinter. She scrolls down the entry, taking big licks as she goes. “He must have muffed his psionic tests,” she’s saying, “or found some way to never take them at all, he’s no measly level two. He levelled a hive at six sweeps.”

“Show us Karkat,” you suggest, struck on the whim, but she says, “Tried. I never could get full access. Anyway, his picture is just a very bad spinning .gif marked _UNDER CONSTRUCTION._ I am beginning to sniff Mr. Appleberry’s work where bad spinning .gifs are concerned -- I.”

Her tongue is dry from too much licking. She keeps swallowing, making spittle. Her vocals all crack. Her tone empty and careful, like someone reading a view chart for an ocular test. 

“Girl,” you say, heavy with contempt, “don’t fall apart now. NOBODY GIVES THE MEREST MOTHERFUCKING SHIT.”

In truth, you’re caught between stress and satisfaction. You’re seeing Captor burn. The flames will lick his toes and curl his claws. The clean hot flame will char his elbows and ring his wrists. There’s just the woe of those who will get burned with him, those he’s lead astray down this motherfucking ill-paved path. 

She’s still scrolling down. Profile says Captor’s still aboard some Threshecutioner ship, the _Brutality,_ rated SEO. Says he got treated a couple months back for a brief case of space scurvy. 

“And will you cover for him?” you say, making your voice sugary. “You going to toss your justice down and GRIND IT BENEATH A DIRTY BOOTHEEL, INQUISITOR, lie and say you heard no implicate? BECAUSE IT LOOKS LIKE THAT’S ALL YOU’RE ABOUT. Looks to me like that’s your plan.”

“My plan is not to turn away from justice,” she says steadily. “I plan on giving him all the law he needs.”

  


  
When she brings up the new screen, her lids narrow behind her specs. She lets out a long, cracked breath. She lets out air whistle. “Ah,” she says, making shitty mock of levity. Echo of a joke. “Bless the munificent dragonyyy’d race. There _is_ more than one Captor.”

“The _fuck,”_ you say. “THE FUCK IS THAT.”

“An identification profile,” she says, “with colours and words.”

“You know what I MEAN, YOU HERETICAL LOAD, a pus-blood don’t live that long.”

She’s correct about there being more than one, though. All detail blocked out. All dressed in censor. Something drains from her, but ain’t replaced with the trappings of hope. Instead she is as grim and as careworn as despair. You’re the opposite. Inside you are bubble. Inside you are a-panic with the ecstasies, itching to do violence, but at the same time you wanna card your claws through your nugskin and scream. Want to draw your own blood. Tear follicle. Make noise. You got some kind of old Messiah mania in you, feels like, only you want to sit down and rock your skull in your palms and you don’t

know

WHY.

You ain’t got the knowing of yourself. Fizz without focus. This makes you angry in the old way, the acid and vinegar angry. Your partner’s pulling up the transcription files. “Fuck you think is going on?” you demand, and she doesn’t answer. You don’t realize the decibel you’re wicked working when you repeat: “THE _FUCK_ IS _**GOING ON,**_ SISTER?”

When she looks up at you, her flap is curled. She takes your face in her hand and holds you still, pricking each claw in until it bites through your paint. Five pinpricks. Five beads of indigo. The expression on her is derision, but derision mixed with a kind of understanding you don’t want to fucking behold.

“Things are coming to a head now,” she says. “No turning back. No second glances, or in my case, sniffs.”

You say, “We kill the runt of the Signless Sufferer. This shit ceases.”

“I think it is what he was trying to tell me,” she says, and you don’t know if she’s talking to you in whole. “The sacrifice of one for the safety of the other. The loss of the precept for the most optimal outcome... the greater good. I see.”

“THE FUCK DO YOU SEE, the fuck do you _recommend -- ”_

“I will recommend a full sting and assault on the _Imperator_ and a shock troop aboard _Exsanguinator,”_ she says, “and basically hope for the best.”

“And no MENTION OF THE NAME -- ”

“Shut up,” she says, “Circumstantial evidence is not as important as the ship names and the cult hideouts, for capturing the guilty. Just shut up, Mr. Huckleberry, please.”

When you take her wrist and draw it off your face, leaving long scratch, you raise your brow. Terecita says, “For the greater motherfucking good,” and lets out a long hehehehehe crackle cackle, you realize, whatever, girl is fucking shitnugget.

“No!” she says, as though reading your mind. “No, Mr. Grape Faygo, I am -- entirely ready. I exist in a state of readiness and waiting. I am so ready that you would have to rest me on a tray and let my juices run clear.”

When Terezi stands you mop away the blood prickles on your face. You turn her cheek towards you. You make her fucking look at you with blind eye and seeing snout. You mess up her hair with your smear, and you hold the picture of her there just like that. Eye to nug. Nug to memory. Learning her like a word.

“Get on the same page as me,” you say. “GET ON THE SAME RHYME AND RHYTHM. You get through this with me or not at all. No holdback. No subterfuge. You tell me your aim and your thought, legislacerator, or WE WILL NOT MOTHERFUCKING LIVE THE DAY. AND WE ARE GOING -- TO FUCKING -- _LIVE.”_

Something in her softens. You lean down all the way to press your frontpan to hers. You stand there leaning into each other, breathing slow so your pan can get in action. She does not soothe. This ain’t pacification. She tucks in all her edges. She comes the fuck back to herself. Tide back out to sea. Terezi reaches out and gives you a wicked-ass Alternian burn on your arm, which is her way of getting her agree on.

“Sollux never killed six Messiahs,” she says. “”Not his style. No skill points or achievement gets. Gamzee, I want the same thing you do. I want this dreadful shit to cease.”

Terezi wipes your blood off her hair, then wipes her dirtied mitt on your arm. “The other thing I want is to see you fall down a flight of stairs and break your butt,” she adds, and her touch lingers on your armbone, the burn she laid, strokes a tiny line in your blood round your tendon. Feather pressure. 

“After this, sis,” you find yourself saying. “WE GET A TRANSFER OFF _ECHO SIDE._ We go Inquisit elsewhere. Do the clean-up. Do the mop-up. New shit. SEE SOME MOTHERFUCKING SIGHTS, you get me?”

She looks surprised. Gutpunched. There is a heaviness to her flap, a sombreness. It makes you boil.

“I hope you eat ground-up glass in your grubflakes,” she says.

You feel better.

“Or I could NAIL YOUR FUCKING FOOT TO THE FLOOR, if you’re so pailed to the idea of staying -- ”

“No,” she says. “I think that is -- an unusually good idea.”

Baby girl’s hand flutters off you. It’ll be good for her to corpse the fuck behind this, you think. Good for her to cull a lost sinner, a cultist saint.

“All right,” she says, and smiles. “Let’s give the debrief and send out for the assault order. Goodbye, _Imperator._ And may all the innocent be long shot of you.”

  


* * *

  


It seems like _Echo Side_ ought to have changed. Like the buzz should shift, the drift of priests walking thither and hither should speak in different voices in the caverns of your hiveship. The black walls oughta be blacker, the paint brighter, cruder. It’s all the same. All’s similar. When she gives the debrief and the recommend to the College, your lord sitting at the head, everyone seems full of satiety and pleasure at the wicked idea. When she was talking, you somehow expected your old man to know, like he could see Sollux buckteeth Captor on you and you were both dead, but he sat there calm with the rest.

Did both of you get to plan strategy, oversee the sweep? Get hauled out there, commit some real Inquisitional mayhem? Did both of you fuck. You and she got shooed out of that room, even with Terezi saying desperately: “Sir, I would like to recommend Inquisitor Makara and I be present on the _Exsanguinator_ or _Imperator -- ”_

“Normally I would say that idea had MERIT AND CAUTION,” your old man said, “but no.”

“That’s horseshit,” you say. “THAT IS TURD, SIR. Who better than us to oversee? Who better did the work than us to oversee?”

“They will trample clues -- ”

“ -- ain’t culled NO BODY, shit’s unholistic according to -- ”

“ -- enemy agents or crew themselves, time is very important when other people have silly fingers -- ”

“Little Makara,” he said. “TINY PYROPE. You’ll be dancing attendance on me, which I would have thought you both accounted privilege. Now fuck off and leave us to it, children.”

That sucked. But even your wicked sister has to give it to them. The Church don’t squat on their laurels. The Church don’t waste time. She ain’t ceased debrief for longer than two hours before the militant Laughssassin wing is sending in its faithful: those silent and skull-painted brothers and sisters with their garotte wires, their silent tread. You wish you could’ve been amongst ‘em. You wish you could have helped number.

Instead, your old man takes you two into the tent sanctum. The swirl and smoke should have comforted. The gloss and carnival should’ve settled you, but it just ignited more dust in your gut. You would have preferred to spend the time sitting quiet with your girl listening to the events unfold, able to talk about this shit.

There you are, stuck with a pot of tea and your ancestor. He already got salty with you for pacing. Your girl holds a worn tumbler of what looks like Raspberry Creme and doesn’t sip at it, and you fucking hate her poise.

On the private comm you hear all dull detail. All mission parley. 

“ _Shangri-La_ fifteen spans and approaching.

“ _Shangri-La_ ten spans and approaching.

“ _Shangri-La_ five spans and approaching. Holding pattern.

“Holy whoop to the first penetration krew. Holy whoop to the second and third penetration krews. _Chop chop?_ Chop chop. Preparations to be made by first, second and third crews. ETA is forty minutes. Clean run, no spill. Clean run, no spill.

“Stall...”

“Sir,” your girl says, all a sudden, “do you mind if we switch it to text feed? This is like listening to a slo-mo grasketball session.”

With grace and civility, your old man turns it off. You regret its absence. You abjure the empty. “I understand,” he says. “THE NOISE OF THE GOOD WORK BEING DONE IS, ALAS, SOME DREADFUL PEDESTRIAN NOISE. Let’s have some quiet chat, children, just like the good old days. JUST LIKE THE FIRST SWEET SCHOOLFEEDINGS. Makara, sit your assbones down before I sit them down for you.”

You sit your assbones down, kind of chagrin and hot with the set-down. Terezi don’t say a word, just keeps cupping her tea and makes her lids downcast.

“Be of good motherfucking cheer,” says the Grand Highblood, and he takes out a length of spicy black paper. You realize it’s his roll-up. He passes it to you, and then the box of herb he uses in it, and you busy yourself making him a couple sticks. At least it’s some shit to do with your paws. “BE OF SANGUINE EYE. Don’t get me wrong. DO NOT UP AND WRONG ME. You have started down the right road. I got a feeling, my little Inquisition, that TONIGHT IS GOING TO BE A GOOD NIGHT.”

There’s something not precisely happy in him: anticipation, more like. The hungry wait. You try to keep your pan fixated on rolling his joint as tight and neat as is possible, but your nug squirms. There’s a low-level prickle of anxiety in that room. There is a deep remnant fear. 

“How long do these motherfuckin’ _take,_ ” you say. 

“Sir,” says your partner, glutinous as pie, “could we have an improving anecdote to help Inquisitor Makara relax?”

Fuck the girl. She can go boil.

Your old man says, “An improving anecdote, huh.”

You finish rolling, or at least get as finished as you’re going to get. You lick your thumbpad and roll it on the edge of the paper, pinch it shut and try to smooth out the lumps. This he takes from you with great consideration, then nods. “I’ve schoolfed you,” he says. “I’ve spoken you the wicked parable. I HAVE READ TO YOU FROM THE CARNIVAL PSALTER. All histories. How about -- while we practice patience and motherfucking wait -- you tell _me_ something.”

From his sylladex, out comes his box of sulfur twigs. These strike a bright green light with a hot smoke smell, and after he lights his blunt he pinches out the flame between his digits. The Grand Highblood takes an oily drag. “Tell me about the Demoness,” he says.

“Wiggler boogeyman,” you say.

“Funny online creep paste,” says your girl. “Possibly with links to pre-colony propaganda about lowblood psychics.”

“Did I ask for information,” he says pleasantly, “OR YOUR MOTHERFUCKING OPINIONS?”

Across the pad feed on the table, _IMPERATOR’S SECOND ENGINE CONFIRMED DISABLED_ is whipping past like a paper cut. “A monster,” Terezi ventures. “Someone who augurs awful ill to all Alternia. You can know her by her oculars shining with a million unearthly colours and the corpses having double wand wounds, that kind of thing. And if she is in a horror story she is the one scratching the back of the vehicle where the protagonist and their moirail are papping each other.”

“That’s all they say?”

“Yo,” you say, “sometimes they Photochop her all STANDING IN YOUR MOTHER FUCKING GARMENT CAVERN, like to scare.”

“One of my FLARP buddies used to know a lot more,” says your girl, “as a hobby. She swore she was an actual historical figure, she said she was real.”

“She _is_ real,” says your old man.

With anyone else it would be a joke. Him fucking with you. You both getting pranked. Neither of you laugh or raise brow: your girl can most like smell his seriousness, and you can see it beading on him like sweat. “I saw her as a young troll,” he continues, and he purses his flap to let a thin whistle of cig smoke out. “I spoke to her as a young troll. NO, SHE IS REAL AS YOU OR ME.

“She wore the shape of a pretty ninjette, had eyes of the double light. Horns like fire curlicue. I beheld her as making way down the long dusty road that lead back to the Cathedral, kids, WAS FOOTSORE AND TRAVELWEARY FROM A LONG WALK. New to the Church still. Wayward still. Back from before I met my lady your progenitor, mind, back when I was alone.”

You irritate that this could turn down a sidetrack nobody wants to get their jog on along, he blessedly doesn’t. “It had been a long night already,” your ancestor continues. “ALREADY IT HAD BEEN A LONG HARD GOODNIGHT. I had suffered a case of serious motherfucking disappoint. I was heavy of pusher. My faith had been tried hard and wrung dry. So I had no thought in my skull when there she was in the late light of the green moon, ALL STANDING BY THE CROSSROADS LONG AND LITHE. 

“Her smile seemed like it had a hundred teeth, when she called out to me.”

“What did she motherfucking say?”

All your old man does is smile, too, thin-lipped and nostalgic, slight and cool.

“That’s between her and me,” he says, “BETWEEN SHE AND I ONLY, AND IT AIN’T FOR ME TO SAY. Expunge those shit stories as heresy. BURN THEM AS DOGGEREL. The Demoness is high in the thoughts of the Dark Carnival.

“But I’ll tell you this: I turned right around and went back for my quarry. I backed the _FUCK_ UP, you understand.”

It’s your legislacerator’s turn for curiosity pique. “Your quarry, sir?”

Another one of those smiles. The smoke from his death stick is deep and blue in the tent sanctum dark. He lets the ash build up on the end like a soft tail. “Let’s just say she was in the crowd next night, regular as clockwork, a pleasure to the eye,” he said. “Watched while the Executor got those irons good and hot. And the crowd stared with her like bleatbeasts and cattle.”

He exhales, all low rattle and phlegm. “Wasn’t the last time I saw her,” he says, “was not the last time I was put in mind of her. Well, children. WELL FUCKING WELL. Didn’t I wonder if I would _MEET HER AGAIN TONIGHT?”_

For a sec you think that, if you turned around, you might see a woman standing in the doorway of the tentblock. If you turned around you would be a fool and a wiggler. If you turned around you’d be a motherfucking idiot. You don’t. But for just a sec, you get icy needles down your spinal cordage. You wrap your mitt around your teacup, and you knock the whole thing back. It’s thin and sour on your tongue.

The Grand Highblood picks up the pad with the text feed. TROLL SUBDUE COUNT, it reads, and the counter keeps upping itself. 16. 20. 29. 31. 

“A whole nest of ‘em,” he says, with great satisfy. “YOU’VE MADE ME PROUD.”

A crackle of static. A voice has been patched into the feed, and you realize with a start that it’s doing direct address to the old man. “My lord,” some voice rasps. “We’ve discovered a motherfucking shuttle ejection from _Imperator_ pre-mission. Our calculations say it should still be in the area. Permission for the _Shangri-La_ to give pursuit.”

“GIVEN, CAPTAIN,” he says. “Bring it in. AS BEFORE, ONLY CAPTURE, NO CULL. Go with the clown.”

“All whoop, most Mirthful.”

Your partner betrays no perturb, except if you know how to look for it. You are a scholar of her suffering. There is tension in her littlest digit, and her noseholes flatten just some. If you felt wired before, your epidermis is making like electric dust now. Feels like you’re shivering. Feels like you’ll never get still. 

The Grand Highblood shakes off the cap of ash on his stick. He lets it sit for a mo and smoulder in its lumpen tray, and when he looks at you both his face is contort into something you guess is kindly. His wizened flap reveals teeth and gum. His eyes are great and dark, and his mitts held so still. In his intravenals all kinds of shit bubble, and when he gives you a swift wink it strikes you like a bullet. You are sick with helplessness.

“Little Makara,” he says, “TINY PYROPE,” and sighs out smoke. His expression shifts, subtle and real. He looks tired. Looks more real, somehow. In almost a normal voice he says, “It’s been a long life. I’ll be motherfucking glad when I reach its terminus. Our Lord has promised me that I’ll get all the entropy I can have when my job’s done. I have bided too long for any clown to bear...”

“Fuck that,” you say. “Destroy it. TO HELL WITH DYING.”

He lets out a couple low, prickly chuckles. Rasps a laugh. “I used to think I could never have enough time,” he says. “Used to be of the thought that it was all TOO SHORT FOR MY PURPOSES. When the Cult is dead death will be like lying back in the slime, you get? LIKE GOING TO RECUPERACOON AT THE END OF A VERY -- _VERY_ \-- LONG NIGHT.”

“I thought you’d only let the throne go once you got motherfucking spilled for it.”

“I said I was ready,” he says, “NOT THAT I WOULD MAKE SHIT EASY FOR YOU. You’ll train for sweeps to best me.”

“Where do the Mirthful go when they’re dead?” your girl wants to know. “This seems to be a very amorphous point in the theology.”

The Grand Highblood taps his cigarette, then sticks it back in his flap. “On account of the answer being wherever we are so desired,” he says. “Another death will await me, after. The SACRED DOUBLE DEATH. Breathe relief that your span won’t be so ruinously long.”

“Inquisitor Makara and I were wondering,” she says, light and careful, “if, all goes well, we could perhaps do our investigatory work away from _Echo Side.”_

You say, “Rout out the cult seeds.”

“Get some travelling in,” says Terezi. “I hear the inner-ring galaxies are lovely this time of season.”

“Yeah, I want you kids to go and spread our holy terror through the Fleet,” says the Grand Highblood, and breathes in another bladderful of smoke. You are relieved, some. “Child, you must pass your bar examinations. MAINTAINING LINKS TO THE LEAGUE IS OF THE UTMOST IMPORTANCE. It’s been a while since the Church gave such weight to the law. Makara, you will spread the hilarious gospel wherever you go. Act as agent and motherfucking missionary. Let them know who will be sitting in the throne.”

Your cup feels heavy in your hand.

“Sir,” you say. “You’ve got the way of talking like -- you popped your clogs already. Popped your clogs when there is still work to be done.”

Your ancestor sighs, some. All penitence. All thought. “Blood of my blood,” he tells you, “it’s the motherfucking **_ANTICIPATION._** Now give me a minute’s prayer. You too, my GODAWFUL LITTLE ATHEIST, speak to the void if you got nobody else to speak at. You’ll be mummering benediction more than once in your career.”

You lean forward on your elbows. She knots her digits together and won’t incline her nug. Once upon a time you would’ve craved this, known easy how to address the two most truly ninja brethren. You knew how to during pie and you knew how to after. But you’re so conflicted that you just shut lid and think of no shit at all.

The text feed chirrups. Your old man’s personal bleater bleats too. You quit your shit-ass non-prayer to pay close attention. The feed reads all you need to have the knowing of: _IMPERATOR_ SECURE, it says. FINAL COUNT 39 DETAINED, 7 NEEDFUL EXECUTED, 4 MESSIAHS LOST IN ACTION.

OBJECTIVES COMPLETED.

SECONDARY OBJECTIVES COMPLETED.

 _SHANGRI-LA_ SETTING COURSE FOR HOLY CENTER _ECHO SIDE._ FAYGO FOR ALL

The Grand Highblood lets out a breath. He raises one bone-swollen hand to cross himself Mirthful style, forks and all.

“Those worthy motherfuckers,” he says. “Well, Inquisitors. SHALL WE UP AND SEE WHAT PRIZES YOU CAUGHT IN OUR NET?”

  


* * *

  


It still takes a couple for _Shangri-La_ to return and dock with _Echo Side,_ so seeing don’t come immediate. Both of you end up sitting around the detention block in your interrogation scrubs, ready for the dripfeed of cultists you think you’re about to get. She sits perched on a platform, legs all dangle. She scrolls listless through her husk. Her tedium seeps into yours until you rip the husktop out her fingers, prompting squawk, and you drop it down on the table.

Terezi reaches up and tweaks your honk until you snarl. The two of you slap at each other with commitment but no energy. You pull her hair and she slams bootheel into your gut, you wrangle and wrestle until you both draw blood and breathe hard. Then you sink to your forearms against the platform and press your frontpan to her shoulder, and she brings knees up to squeeze around your ribs, and you curve into each other for the longest time.

“No word from any corners,” she says, and lets out a weary, “Blaaar.” 

“What, sis,” you say, knowing you’re muffle, “YOU EXPECT SOME.”

“I did not expect shit.”

“AND SHIT IS WHAT YOU GOT. Leave it be. Almost done now, girl. WE ARE ALMOST FUCKING THROUGH.”

This seems to settle her some. Both of you are pretty fucking agitated. She sifts one mitt up the back of your hair. Her claws scrape a little over your nugfilm. They scritch a little at your scalp. “You need a trim,” she says. “Your mane is getting totally ridiculous.” 

You lift your head as she rounds her palm up against your horn. “These are getting ridiculous too,” she says, but so are hers, the tops are all sharp with new yellow banding and they poke you if she wriggles too much in the slime. You raise your chinbone, roll your pupils to show you’re hot shit, and you kiss her. She kisses back like it’s relief. You both suck face like you’re drawing nutrients from it, up and making your flaps and tongues one thing, getting the clasp of each other. Kissing like sad panic. 

You’re just making up your mind to grab one of her boobs when her palmhusk rattles on the table. When she picks it up, both her brows beetle into her hairline. You crane. You nose over to look. What you see gives you pause.

I’d like you to pay close attention.

“White Text Guy?” she says aloud, bemuse.

“Wait,” you say, “Damn, yo. This is my wicked sign of God motherfucker.”

“Weird Mr. Vanilla Milkshake was your _tip-off?”_

Soon you are going to make a decision.  
Of course, I won’t bother to influence it either way. I have the advantage of already having deduced what you choose.   
GC: OH MY GOD TH1S 1S NOST4LG1C 4S 1T 1S SH1TTY  
GC: 1 KNOW TH4T 1F YOU R34LLY W4NT3D TO P4Y M3 B4CK YOU WOULD OFF3R SOMETH1NG B3TT3R TH4N YOUR W31RD 4DV1C3  
GC: WHY 4R3 YOU B4CK NOW!  
GC: WHY D1D YOU T4LK TO G4MZ33?  
You might call it professional interest in your blossoming careers.  
GC: YOU KNOW, YOU W3R3 WRONG  
I very much doubt it.  
GC: 1TS NOT R34LLY L1K3 V4N1LL4 M1LKSH4K3  
GC: 1TS MOR3 1N TH3 R34LM OF SOM3 SORT OF M4YONN41S3  
GC: YOU W3R3 4LSO WRONG 4BOUT SOM3TH1NG 3LS3  
GC: 4BOUT 4R4D14 4ND D34TH 4ND B3L13F  
I’m never wrong. It’s just a matter of pacing, my dear.  
The matter of dilation and your adorable interpretation of time.  
Unfortunately, you perception of object permanence is somewhat handicapped. Your head simply does not have the correct properties to conceive its full width and breadth. Unlike mine, which is round and white and has a large quantity of dark water sloshing around inside.  
GC: GROSS  
Regardless, I would like to pay you back for your tip. There is no need to thank me.  
GC: 1 DIDNT  
I am far too polite a guardian to let debts pile up unpaid.  
This train has been derailed from its proper course for too long. Look at it as us helping each other get back on the track.  
I would like you to consider your future.  
GC: OK, SO WH4TS TH3 T1P  
I just gave it to you.

“This motherfucker’s getting on my nerves,” you say.

By the way, if Mister Makara is with you, you can also put his fears to rest and inform him that I am not God. Just someone who works on the same floor.  
You may also inform him that eavesdropping is rude.

“The fuck is THAT MEANT TO MEAN, the fuck does he _know -- ”_

GC: NO 1 QU1T3 4GR33!   
GC: H3 SUCKS 4ND 1S B4S1C4LLY 1MPOL1T3   
Hoo hoo hoo.   
Young love is certainly a beautiful thing. :y   
Anyway, I suppose I could elucidate. When you have begun laying the foundations for a prison, and you instead choose to build a water fountain, what problem lies therein?   
GC: YOU W1LL NOT G3T 4 V3RY GOOD W4T3R FOUNT41N, 1 GU3SS >:?   
GC: YOU T3LL M3   
GC: 1 KNOW YOU 4R3 DY1NG TO >:P   
Build your walls.   
Also, regarding your clever friend with the colorful spectacles.   
And regarding your charming friend with the heavy-footed shift key.   
I have some information that might interest you.   
GC: PL34S3 T3LL M3 3V3RYTH1NG YOU KNOW R1GHT NOW   
GC: OR MY LOV3LY P4RTN3R 4ND 1 4R3 GO1NG TO H4V3 TO HOLD YOU 1N CONT3MPT OF TH3 COURT

  
\-- a********G*** [AG] 8egan 8riefing gallowsCalibrator [GC] \--  


  
**** YOU ARE NOW CHATTING THROUGH xX~*SERKETWARE*~Xx! ****   
**** IT’S AWESOME! PERFECT! ****   


  
**** HAXCKED 8Y VRISKA SERKET FOR xX~*VRISKA SERKET*~Xx ****   
**** PROGRAMMED 8Y xX~*VRISKA SERKET*~Xx ****   
**** ALL RIGHTS 8ELONG TO xX~*VRISKA SERKET*~Xx ****   


AG: Mayday!  
AG: Mayday mayday mayday!!!!!!!!  
GC: NO NO NO NO NO  
GC: OH MY DR4GONYYYD GOD HOW DO YOU 4LW4YS H4V3 TH3 WORST T1M1NG

Your old man’s standing in the doorway. You didn’t even get the hearing of the open door.

“Children,” he says.

He fills up the doorway with his bulk and his quiet. In his face those eyes burn like two filaments. Both you and your girl freeze and stare like two dumb beasts. Like you expect execution. Like you expect reprimand. In fact, your old man looks ready to shit fireworks; the Grand Highblood’s lit from within. He looks like he could open his flap and rowd the song that calls the Mirthful Minstrels back to show you all the paradise planet, and that he already got told the paradise planet has some small dude and a Faygo volcano.

“Oh, children,” he says. “PRECIOUS BABIES.”

And he reaches out and ups and does a thing that nobody’s ever done to you. As Terecita sucks the air through her fangs, your ancestor reaches out and takes your paw in his. Nobody’s held your hand. His palm feels old and scaly. Your fingers don’t make the circumference of his digits. They close round yours like dry old traps and part of you likes it, part of you likes it just fine.

“Sir -- ”

“PRECIOUS FUCKING BABIES,” he says, says your old man, and then he reaches out and takes your partner’s too. The palmhusk slips from her fingers, and she scrabbles to shove it in pocket. Both of you get your goggle on. Blood still drying on your skins, you can still take a sec to give each other what the fuck faces as he grabs your mitts so sweet and so delicate. He drags you three abreast down the corridor, priests pressing themselves to the wall as you pass, knowing you both look bemused as shit.

You never heard him sound this dreamy, like someone put sopor in his intravenals. But his body is a live wire. He is all a-sweat. He is all a-tremble. You want to look over at Terezi so you can see if she’s the same, if there’s a meaty scream going on inside her brainpan. A bullet inside a chamber, backfiring.

You’re dragged down corridor and up hallway. His grip is gentle and you got the awareness of how he could rip your arm out its socket, how you’re joined at the touch. Touched at the join. He’s holding your hand. All woe passes away to this stupid motherfucking joy, and you can’t even envy Terezi her hand-hold, can’t jealous of it. You’re both his kids. Both you and she are strung rigid and in odd pulled shapes, barely breathing.

Priests scatter as you both get yanked to the brig. Cardinals sign forks at you in passing. You get took to the prison blocks. Through one of the big doors to a holding pen you are lead, through a squeeze corridor that helps stop escape route, and then you are taken to a small blank room with a hospiterror IV and pipes attached to the wall. These intravenals are attached to a big bubbling machine. These intravenals are attached to a troll, bound all around with cords, crowned with a psionic inhibitor that flashes blue and red.

The troll is drooping and bloodied. You recognise the double horns of Sollux Captor.

Hands dropped -- your palm is working wicked empty -- the Grand Highblood walks a half-circle around, like someone admiring a baby barkbeast or a pretty flower. You don’t dare a glance at your girl. Her face will be schooled. Her mask will be steel. Captor’s staring sightless down at the ground, no stupid specs now, just wires funnelling into his brain. There is a long fine chain around his stem that hangs bloodied from your shirt, and it’s the sign of the two motherfucking manacles. The little block smells like sweat and piss and fear. The little block has familiar smells to you. You can get the twitch of your girl’s nose working away, busy sniffling.

“Sir,” your partner says, in perfect calm, “is _this_ the scion of the Signless Sufferer?”

Captor’s head whips up. He looks at your girl with one eye blue and one eye red. Hair plasters back to his nug with wet, big patches on his t-shirt at the pits. There are thick rivulets of blood travelling from each lacrimal sac and each aural canal. Gotta give your partner credit. Give her all the credit in the universe. She doesn’t even flinch.

“Him? Fuck no,” says your old man. “OH NO, DEAR ONE. Almost but not quite. The guard to the door of the cult. The serf to its whims. THIS IS THE MINDSLAVE’S EXCREMENT. This is the wriggler of the befouled yellowblood. I told her: the flesh of our flesh slops around. This is the Psiioniic’s get, my children, AND MY GOD DID I YEARN FOR HIS DEATH.”

“So hurry it the fuck up,” says the troll, and with his maw full of blood and teeth it comes out tho, “I didn’t know there was a lag time.”

You say, “Did he up and admit to those MOST EGREGIOUS clown killings?”

“I take full responsibility,” says the troll, “but it wasn’t anyone’s fault but theirs.”

Your legislacerator says suddenly, “The Psiioniic is still alive, isn’t he? He was kept alive, somehow.”

“Clever girl,” your ancestor says softly. Captor’s pointy chin swings from him to her and back again. “You’ve been doing your reading. You’ve been matching the dots. Yes, he was taken from me. DENIED A TRUE CULTIST DEATH for being the right paw of the Signless.”

“The fuck,” you say. “The fuck does a pissblood live _THAT MANY SWEEPS?”_ but then you connect the dots yourself, and your girl does the rest.

Terezi snaps her long fingers. “The _Alternia._ He’s the Helmsman of the _Alternia.”_

“He’s pan dead,” says Sollux. “He’s a fucking steering wheel.”

Nobody pays him much attention.

“My lady your Empress will see his nug between my fingers,” says the Grand Highblood, all peaceful. “HER MOST IMPERIOUS CONDESCENSION WILL GET THE WAY THE WIND IS BLOWING WHEN THE _PSIIONIIC’S_ CHILD IS BROKE BEFORE HER. The second generation. All cultists. ALL FUCKIN’ HERETICS. WHO WILL QUESTION HER BELOVED NOW?”

All the fuckin’ heretic tied to the wall says is, hoarsely, “So whip my head off and show me how it’s really done, you piece of shit.”

“Gamzee,” your old man says. “Make sure the face is intact and that the jellies don’t pop out.”

You’re kinda unwilling, to be honest. Your girl is giving you no sign. Your girl does not indicate. “You sure we don’t need him to interrogate -- ”

Strangely enough, your ancestor says: “I do not desire the words from his flap. WHY THE MOTHERFUCKING HESITATE? You want a torture session? I don’t want to waste the time, little Makara. I DO NOT WANT TO WASTE MY PRECIOUS TIME. Perhaps once, but I got bigger fish to fry in my pan. Be ungentle, but -- ”

“Stop,” says Terezi.

You stop mid-saunter. Captor stops mid-drip. Your old man stops mid-breath, so she got all eyes on her. There is no fear or pain in her voice, just simple consideration. Like you’re all figuring the best way to hang some portrait. “Inquisitor Makara, you do not have the subtlest fingers in all the Fleet,” she’s saying. “I’ll do it myself.”

“LADIES MOTHERFUCKIN’ FIRST,” you say.

Captor slumps. Something drains away. Relief. He lies like a rag doll in his tube chain. He lies like soft sacrifice. Wants to give his belly to your partner, not to you. She can put down this shit herself if she so wants. It’s not the usual to feel sorry for your kismesis, but -- you feel the prickles of being sorry for her, all unwont in your gut, sitting alongside the gladness that Captor’s about to get his throat cut. Fuck him, too. Fuck sympathy. He gets what comes to him.

She goes over to him and she tilts up his chin with her finger. Her cane sword she shakes free of its scabbard, lets it clatter to the ground without even caring. The little shit tilts his stem back for her like he can’t wait for the cut. You expect the slice and the fountain. You expect her to make it swift. Loving. Soft.

Instead, she says suddenly, “Sir. What is this troll’s psionic level?”

“Negligible, comparatively,” says the Grand Highblood. “He ain’t his father’s grub.”

Sollux says hoarsely, “Wait -- ”

“Who was the other contributor to his slurry, sir? Would you know?”

_“Wait -- ”_

“Now, that,” your old man says. “That. THAT IS AN INTERESTING MOTHER FUCKING QUESTION. That is a particular nasty question, little Pyrope.”

“I would like to re-think this idea as, perhaps, a little pedestrian,” she says softly. “The Laughssassins had to crown him with anti-receptors, did they not? Yes, they did. The first examination isn’t always accurate. The round red fruit doesn’t fall so far from the tree. Killing Mr. Mustard here would be a terribly soft option, and it is an acceptable alternative to execution.”

He says, “You mean -- ”

“Test him again,” she says. “Give him a helmsman rating.”

  


  
Arclights of blue and crimson travel up each wall tube. It is a mf’in fireworks display. The pipes tremble and dance but they hold, they hold no matter how much power he pumps into them, but all the hairs on the back of your neck start to stand on end. The air sparks hot and dry. More blood spouts from his eyeholes and earholes, kind of like a mustard fountain or some nasty-looking custard.

 _“T-Z!”_ he bellows. Oh, that ain’t anger. That’s desperation. _“Terezi!”_

“Activate the gag,” says your girl.

“ ** _Terezi,_** you h -- ” 

The clamps activate on his shriller, and his screams go soundless. At no point does he stop struggling. Rockets of blue and red keep shivering up and down each cord, his eyes blaze, he writhes like a fish on the end of a hook. Your old man watches proceeding with no small interest but no surprise, arms big and folded. HIs oculars go to your partner. His gaze is even.

“Do you have the knowing of that lowblood, little Pyrope?”

“Yes,” she says coolly, “but that was before I was a legislacerator, and before he was a criminal.”

You’re glad right there, in that sweaty, sparking room. She’s climbed the whole rock pile. You’re both going to motherfucking live. She retrieves her scabbard and slides her sword back into it, untried. She marches back over to you with something in her soul changed for ever. In her, something’s gone crashing to the floor and is in shards over the carpets. You want to tell her the way your hands were the day you unheaded the lowblood in the culling exam. Even the Grand Highblood somehow knows to leans down, and he takes her hand and he kisses it, over her knuckles like she’s a highcaste lady. 

“Blood of her blood,” he says. HIs smile at you is wide and raw-flapped. HIs smile at you two is the most natural smile he ever gave, fearless and tender, like he honestly suffers from the love of you both. In the corner Sollux Captor squirms like a demented puppet, thrashing without cease. 

“I will make sure you get every legal courtesy your pusher could ever desire,” he’s saying. “You make sure she heads the Cruellest Bar, Makara. You’ll be the one working the wicked bestow on the scribes. LET’S GET ONE OF THE COLLECTIVE TO PUT HIM THROUGH HIS PACES, AND LET US THEN CONCLUDE.”

“Sir, shouldn’t we contact her Imperial majesty to -- ”

“In good time,” he says. “IN GOOD TIME. Do not motherfucking rush me.”

All the while you been wondering, why he’s so pent-up of himself. He makes you wait until one of the Cardinals has come and strapped Captor to a gurney, directed underpriests to collect his pipes and machinery as Terezi watches the whole time. Baby girl does not avert her sniffer. Captor never stops fighting, frame alive and wracked with fretworks of burst yellow capillaries from exertion. 

“What happens,” she asks diffidently, “if he doesn’t make the grade?”

“Then we _WRENCH HIS HEAD OFF.”_

You say, “Seems motherfucking reasonable.”

“Sir, I’d like permission to oversee his testing,” says your partner, as the Cardinal directs some fingers-and-thumbs Messiah to wrap piping around the wrists. He struggles until you think he’s going to die from exhaustion. From those spindly fingers shudder blue and red, burning the air and making the underpriest snatch his mitt back. “As it was my suggestion, I think I ought to see it through -- ”

“Hold him down tight and don’t let the equipment touch his twitcher,” the Grand Highblood says to his priests. “Inject the sedative, you callow motherfuckers, UNLESS YOU WANT THE BLOOD BOILED OUT OF YOUR AURAL CANALS -- no, Inquisitor. We’ve wasted enough time on him as it is. ENOUGH TIME HAS GONE.”

You see her breathe in his going, not letting out exhale until the gurney is clattering down the corridor. Goodbye, Captor. You won’t squeeze out a tear. Attention gets pulled back to your old man, a wicked-ass shamble of shadows in the block, as he takes you both by the paw again. His palm is feverish warm.

“ _Now_ I will give you something to see,” he says.

Through the brig block you go, opposite the way they took Captor cringing on his platform. Down corridor, up hallway. The painted priests peel off as you go, more gates, fewer guards, your old man opening them with a thumb to the wasp and his breath coming in tiny rasps. 

Sounds like he’s halfway to a coronary. Kinda worries you, how het up he motherfucking is, but there’s a furtive feel to him now overlaid on the excite. When you go dragged beside you try to see if Terezi’s trying to communicate, but she’s empty ash, she is a dead fire.

Eventually you get to a plain door at the end of a plain corridor. No paint. No bone. No filigree nor reliquary. This is the least carnival of the dead-ends you’ve seen on _Echo Side,_ not even the whisper of a polka dot nor reek of Faygo. The room inside is blank as the door. You know it for what it is, though. It’s an interrogation block.

There’s a platform and a sitpillar. From a girder up top, two lengths of thick chain dangle. These chains lead to cuffs, worked in such a way that whoever’s in them got to stand with wrists crossed high above their nug. The cuffs contain limp mitts. The mitts are attached to a troll. The troll is leant forward on tiptoe, beaten wet with blood as red as love.

You would know him in a dark room. In a blind light would you know him. 

_Gamzee,_ she’d said, _you are a fool._

  


  
The Grand Highblood locks the door thrice. You hear the buzz of the stinger go, hear his digits on the keypad. There’s something sharp driven into the soft pad just under your thumb, and it takes you a moment to register the pain and another moment to up and register your girl’s pointer claw. It’s been dug in deep until you feel a hot trickle go down your digit. You don’t move. You’re working wicked stillness.

“Now _this,_ ” says your ancestor, “is the scion of the Signless Sufferer, and the CAUSE OF ALL OUR WOE.”

The sitpillar is clattered over the floor for him to sit on, hooked with a hand before your old man puts his sitbones in it. He lets out a small noise that ain’t sigh, ain’t wheeze, satisfaction and exhaust all mixed up together it. In his chains the troll who was your truest love lets out a racking cough, one that brings up gobbets of blood all over his chin.

Candy blood. That motherfucker has blood shaded redpop. That motherfucker is bleeding scarlet from his internals. One of his sockets is so full of blood and bruise that it won’t even open, and the other one’s tracking in a way that tells you he ain’t fully got consciousness. Gougemarks ring the orbital bone. His duds have been stripped off right down to the undercovers, which are stiff black from his wounds.

“I know,” your old man says, breaking the silence. “HE DOESN’T LOOK LIKE MUCH.” He sinks forward so that his hands are steepled, clutched beneath his chin. “Who would have thought that such a slip could cause SO -- MUCH -- _STRIFE?”_

In that room, if you taste anything or you smell anything, you don’t know it. If you think things your pan’s not telling you. Someone spilled you along the way and now you’re empty of anything.

“Sir,” says Terezi. “Her Imperious Condescension said he wasn’t to be harmed.”

Though he shifts in his sitpillar, restless some, he doesn’t tell her to shut it. Doesn’t call her on priggishness. Doesn’t say a damn thing. Your ancestor hulks there in the sitpillar with his hair in a riot and his paint making a mockery of his skeleton. In his mitts there is a very tiny tremble. 

“What the Empress does not know will not hurt the Empress,” he says.

“But he has obviously been -- ”

“WHAT THE EMPRESS CANNOT DO,” says your old man, “CANNOT HURT THE EMPRESS.”

It slides into place gentle-ish, like a bottle taken out by the tide.

“You’re going to kill him,” you say. “Ain’t no pass over to her high Imperiousness. You’re going to end his life.”

“NOT IMMEDIATELY.”

The Grand Highblood stands like it’s a difficulty. His tread on the bare metal floor is a heavy echo. He walks on over to the troll you wanted for your moirail and he reaches out to him, touching his cheek, hulking over him like a cholerbear with a spratapuss. “Oinkbeast like this,” he says, distant, “you don’t eat all at once.”

Your girl’s claw is still in your palm. You didn’t even realise.

Old man continues through your distract: “HE IS MY MESSAGE, YOU UNDERSTAND? He will be my message. She could never have understood. She could barely want. I’LL PASS THE PISSBLOOD TO HER AS A SOP. He will be my sign to the Cult. Symbol for the Signless. I can keep him alive nights and nights, children, I can keep him nights and nights until we let him go.”

When he pulls them away his fingertips colour red, like he touched them to paint. Next to you your girl is stiff and cold as a statue, except that her nose is wrinkle. 

“The panel has a recording option,” says the Grand Highblood, looking at his mitt like it be revelation. “INQUISITOR MAKARA. Turn it on. We’ll take out anything untoward in post-production. The beauty of motherfucking technology. INQUISITOR PYROPE. Take my palmhusk, little faithful, and if anyone wants me tell them to _GO AND GET PAILED.”_

Well, those are the weirdest fucking minutes of your motherfucking existence. As a boy drips red to the floor you’re messing around with the vidpanel at the side of the room, finding the lens, adjusting the focus. Every so often you touch the hole in your hand that your partner made. It brings you back to bear. 

If your old man finds you both stiff and silent, he don’t notice. He does not give it time nor thought. His whole world is the boy in the chain. Your whole world is the chain and the boy. Feels like you’re moving through grub molasses. Shit’s paralytic. The vid feed shows a troll hanging from a chain looking all of six sweeps old, and you guess that when you move away it’ll show two Inquisitors in the corner. Get a squint on and they’ll look like they’re holding hands, but in actual they will be sticking claw into each other’s palmar meat.

It will also get its showing on of the First Laughssassin presiding. The ancient bulk of the Church of the Mirthful Messiahs. He stands over the Sufferer’s grub and touches him again. Flicks away blood-damp locks of hair. Touches those nubby motherfucking horns. 

“YOU THIEVED EVERYTHING FROM ME,” says the Grand Highblood.

That one bloody ocular is tracking, but the pupil’s huge with uncomprehend. 

“Even yourself,” says your old man, “even your miserable motherfucking shell of self, MY DEAR, SQUANDERED ME FOR TALK OF AN EMPTY PARADISE AND YOUR SMILE. The only thing you didn’t steal was God. God was unstolen, however hard you motherfucking tried for it, and you did motherfucking try. THOSE MOST RIGHTEOUS NINJAS SENT YOU TO TEST ME, I GOT THE UNDERSTANDING OF IT, AND NOW I WILL HAVE PASSED THE TRIAL _TWICE.”_

It is with every indifference that your old man backhands him. Just a whistle of the hand through the air. The snap-back of the stem. Noise of flesh violently meeting flesh. His flap has split. His nose is running. From the lie of his ribs you know some of them are cracked: work of clubs. You rake your smallest claw down Terezi’s wrist.

“AND NOW,” your old man says, “and now.”

What he does to his body is difficult and quick. What he enacts on his flesh is subtle. It’s motherfucking genius work. It’s just warm-up, loosening him, working back to consciousness through pain. 

You watch. You don’t move. Neither of you move. You watch every thing that happens, every motherfucking thing. The shiny peel of skin and the glisten beneath. Swell on the subcutaneals. The jolt and the vomit, the drag of bloody toe on the floor. Beyond pain. Beyond plan. No point in turning your partner’s shoulder and finding tactic in her face. There is no motherfucking plan, don’t you know? There is nothing, except for this.

When he is awake enough the Grand Highblood tilts up his chin, wipes away the blood, waits for gobbets to be gurgled out the flap. He says, “Renounce your belief and dissolve the Cult.”

More gobbets come out. The pupil rolls up behind eyelid, then rolls back out. For the first time, you see him conscious, hear the thick slur of his voice.

And he says, “Please.”

“RENOUNCE YOUR BELIEF,” says your ancestor, “AND _DISSOLVE THE CULT._ Disclaim heresy. IT’S A SIMPLE THING, CHILD. I know you are a wayward child. I KNOW YOU DON’T GOT THE AUTHORITY SO CRUELLY THRUSTED UPON YOU. Renounce your belief and dissolve your motherfucking cult.”

The second word you ever hear him murmur is, “Please.”

“Repeat,” your old man says so coaxingly, so gentle, and now he does the trick it took you a long time to learn. He touches that bloody flaking cheek and he puts the fear in him. It still has the power to make your feet stick to the ground. It still has the power to make you mad and blind, to nearly move for him were it not for your pain. “LOUDER.”

There is no louder. He hangs his head and drips.

After a sec, the Grand Highblood sighs. You heard that sound before. Soft disappointment. Low rasp of dissatisfy. He reaches up and strokes those limp-ass hands, and then with a pop of ozone he draws a club. You feel rather than see your partner’s shoulders curl in, her free hand shoved in her jacket pocket. The recording will get each moment when your ancestor up and starts again.

It’s just a beating. You’ve made trolls die before. There is just so much motherfucking slow to it.

“IT HURTS THE PUSHER TO DO THIS AGAIN,” your old man’s saying. His hands are bright with mutant blood. “It wounds the spirit -- STAY WITH ME. _KEEP AWAKE_ \-- it wasn’t my intent. THIS INTENTION WAS NOT MINE FROM THE START. I did this to you once. I GOT THE WORKINGS OF THIS ON ONCE ALREADY.”

You don’t know when your mutantblood started to weep, only that he does. The recording won’t catch it. He’s dripping out of every motherfucking facehole he has. Grand Highblood acts like he’s wiping some of that mess away with his thumb, like a tenderness, only then his thumb goes up and presses in and what he does with it is hard to look at. What he does with his thumb is irreparable. You hear a _pop_ sound. Next to you Terezi sways a little from one foot to the other, but you’re rooted, you’re still.

Pain dementia. He cries out now. You think you recognise him calling for Captor, and you’re just glad. You are grateful. Thank all righteous mercies he ain’t motherfucking calling for you. All the while your old man never stops. All the while your old man is indefatigable.

“Let me give you the line that ends this,” he says. “LET ME TELL YOU THE MAGICAL WORDS THAT ENSURE THIS CEASES. You say, _I renounce_. You say, _I dissolve_. THAT’S ALL I NEED. You think this is cruelty? Do you even got the knowing of cruelty? Cruelty was the night your geriatric old love stood in the door of my church with her JANK-ASS BLUEBLOOD PARIAH and did suicide through me. How I put her down. How you made me put ‘em all down. CRUELTY IS HOW YOU KEPT THEM _KILLING THEMSELVES_ SWEEPS AFTER SWEEPS AFTER SWEEPS.”

Another mouthful of red gob comes spluttering out. You think he’s trying to say something. The Grand Highblood gets the thinking of this too, because he waits for more gobbet and ceases with his hands. He says, low and sweet: “Begin with _I_.”

“I,” says his captive.

“Good. _Renounce.”_

“Renounce,” is the reply.

_“I dissolve.”_

“I...” 

The third thing you ever heard Karkat Vantas say is, thick-twitched but audible, each word: “I say you go f-fuck yourself, and fuck your jittershitting clown fuddlery.” 

There is a long moment of silence. Big fingers wrap around Karkat’s elbow. His elbow is nothing. His arm is a matchstick. The thumb tweaks, prelude to a snap. It won’t snap bone. It won’t twinge humerus. The arm will just come off whole and entire, fountaining red before it gets cauterised for the continue. It is in this breathless pause that you feel your foot shifting to move, and Terezi suddenly says, “Sir. Please forgive me, but there is an incoming message.”

“You know what I said,” says the Grand Highblood, “about any PALTRY INCOMING MESSAGE HORSESHIT.”

“Sir, it’s the Imperious Condescension.”

The pause hangs in the air before the arm gets dropped. Before he comes on over and rips the palmhusk out of Terezi’s hands, the one she had shoved in her pocket. Scans it over. Looks at whatever message lies there. After a moment he taps furious away at it himself, and holds it up to his mouth: “We have a royalist leak,” he says, terse, to whoever is on the other end. “KILL ANYONE WITH GILLS ON BOARD THIS SHIP.”

Your girl says, “Sir?” That’s good; you ain’t got voice.

“The _Echo Side_ is going to go on lockdown until this is over,” says your old man. His voice is hard and cool as metal. His voice is motherfucking chill. “Children -- FAITHFUL CHILDREN. Loyal children. I am putting you in charge of this motherfucking room. I will be back within five minutes. Anyone who approaches the door, you kill. Anyone who knocks, you cull. YOU ARE CHARGED WITH THE SAFEKEEPING AND PROTECTION OF THIS BLOCK, DO YOU GET ME?”

“Sir -- ”

“I have endured this too long,” he says, “to let Peixes interfere. She don’t even know SHE DON’T EVEN GOT THE FATHOMING. I’ll be where she can’t touch me after. Let the bodies pile outside, children, you unlock that door for me and me only.”

In truth, it takes him like ten measly steps to cross floor to the door. For both you and she to somehow bow in his direction. For him to wish you sincere “WHOOP, WHOOP,” and disappear in a haze of frustrate and annoy. It feels like ten hours for him to turn and ten hours for the door to clang shut behind him, and for the block to be empty and still.

Takes ten hours for each step you take toward the boy in the chains. Your partner says, low and warning, “Mr. Huckleberry,” but you don’t know what she’s warning you of or for. Warning you of him. Warning him of you. You don’t got the comprehension. You stop in front of him and marvel at how fucking small he is, how bloodied, how ferocious and half-dead. How easy it would be to reach over and snap his stem.

“Please kill me,” he says to you, quiet, candid. 

Makes you realise: he thinks you a stranger.

  


  
When you touch him he flinches. Part of you burns, right down to char.

You make your hand sit away from him, some, make sure your mitts don’t touch his wounds. His oculars snap open. You have to avert your gaze. Your gaze averts. Each breath he takes is shallow and stumbling over itself. He is in terrible pain already, but he ain’t even got the knowing of what terrible or pain is. Not yet. He could. His flap is too small for his teeth. His brows are furrow. He bares himself to you in snarl.

You fall in love, all over again.

  


  
His frontpan is hot and slimy with blood to your lips. His pulse thrashes around in his neck like Captor did on his gurney. “Best friend,” you say, and that’s all you can say, no sorry can escape your twitcher. Just “best friend,” over and over, stroking the blood away from his poor wet face, kissing his hairline. Like a madman. He slips in and out of consciousness, not understanding. “Best friend.”

Maybe if you and he were different trolls you’d have to make it a decision. The decision was made for you long ago. This is you motherfuckin schoolfed all about the wicked news, this is you with the under motherfuckin standing of who you was made out to be all a motherfucking long. All in lifelong denial, about who you were and what your calling be. 

“What happens,” you say, “what MOTHER FUCKING HAPPENS, if I slit his choke right now?”

You imagine the shape of your legislacerator’s mouth. The tilt of her nug.

“The Grand Highblood forgives us our transgression, fades away peacefully, and we spend the rest of our sweeps ruling Church and court with iron claw,” she says. “Sadder but wiser, beloved and more attractive each passing sweep.”

“Yeah?”

“No, you moron,” she says wearily. “I give you immediate head removal surgery via my sword, and then they find me hanging from the rafters.”

“He’s a heretic. YOUR BLOOD KNOWS HIM FOR HERESY. My Church is your Church. ALL WE EVER MOTHERFUCKING WEPT AND BLED FOR.”

“He’s an innocent, and we can start over,” says Terezi, all calm. “Gamzee, consider this: there is an infinitesimal part of you that is also Pyrope.” 

There is an infinitesimal part of you that belongs to some dead chick. To the law and the writ. To the book and the judge. All the shit you denied as being work of hands and bore, trying to set the universe into an order it wouldn’t fucking stick by. The rest of you, you thought that was the territory of some truly righteous ninja shit: the mirthful and the miraculous, the divine and the clown. Messiah and Messiah only.

Well, you were mother

_fucking_

**KIDDING YOURSELF.**

“I love him,” you say, and she says: “I know.”

You don’t even weep none, and you turn away from God.

His chains come apart in your hands like they are grub taffy. The shackles crack beneath your fingers. You’re not your old motherfucker Zahhak, but the anger seems to come out of one pore now and that’s the one that rules your hands. The rage makes you gentle for the first time ever. His body falls forward and you catch him, and there’s Terecita right next to you skinning off her coat as you try to carry him in your arms, try to find a good angle. 

“Here, hurry up,” she says. She ties it around his waist and you bind him to your back instead, arms around your neck, bound together with her tie. His legs are kind of flopping out but there ain’t much you can do, this shit be awkward but you’ll manage. He is so light it makes your heart sting. Karkat bitches something like, “I can walk,” and she says, “Oh, _please,_ Mr. Cherry Pie, I beg to differ,” in the gentlest way you ever heard.

Your boy rouses enough to say, “ _Terezi?_ ” and then he slumps out again.

“Terecita -- ”

She don’t let you continue, and she says: “We have very little time before he discovers our call ruse was a distraction.” The cane is tucked beneath her arm. The sword is unsheathed. The top she sticks in her belt. “Come on. Let’s blow this iced comestible stand.”

Both of you stand in accord. You open that door, and you leave the bloodied block behind you. Karkat makes a red spatter trail but you don’t give a fuck. You go through gate and down corridor. You move through hallway. The first painted priest you see is some douchebag holding a bottle of Moon Mist, and Terezi slides her blade through his neck.

That’s how you go. You trail destruction behind you. Each clown you meet goes down in a fountain of indigo, purple and red all mixed together on the floor of _Echo Side_. You bathe the ship in the blood of its worshippers. You carve up anyone you meet and leave them as silent alarm. These are hardened clown devout with cruel hand and implement, but you and she were tempered in a hotter fire than they. It will be a long way from the private brig block to the dock of the ship.

When your girl deviates mid-corridor, stops at a four-way intersect and heads west, you don’t follow. You cease. Adjust the unconscious beloved on your back. You catch your breath and wipe off gore and say, “Wrong way, sister.”

Terezi mops face with her sleeve. “No, I’m right; they would have taken Mr. Appleberry this way, the only equipment they’d have to measure a psionic would be in the engineer bioblock -- ”

“There is no going back,” you say, “for MISTER MOTHERFUCKING APPLEBERRY.”

She cools. She ices over. A shutter comes down between you and she. “I am getting Sollux,” she says steadily.

“Then you got sixty seconds to decide life route,” you say. “That shit is opposite to the dock. THAT SHIT IS A MAZE OF LITTLE TUNNELS ALL ALIKE. WE ARE OPPOSING THE CLOCK HERE.”

“I am _getting Sollux -- “_

“Fifty seconds,” you say, “old man comes after us, we’re dead. OLD MAN COMES AFTER US AND WE ARE ALL DEAD.”

“Sollux can help us! He is easily a juggernaut-level psionic! If we’re going to outrun this heinous clown rig then we need all the power we can -- ”

“The motherfuck you going to do, PLUG HIM IN? You go one way, then Karkat and me will go the other. I’m getting him out. I am GETTING HIM OUT, and if you want to make me go alone then I will GO THE MOTHER OF FUCK **ALONE.”**

Her lenses glitter. Her paint is smear with blood and her sleeve. In the corridor light she is haloed in hard yellow, staring with wild surmise like a child. Waiting like you did on the bank of the beach, checking out over the ocean for an old goat who was never going to show anyway. The disbelief of pain. “But you won’t get out of here without me,” she says, and it ain’t threat.

“He’s going to get his rot on in a plug nest,” you say. “You picked his fate. NOW PICK OURS.”

She cries out, pushed past all dignity: “You’re _happy,_ you awful rancid douchebag, you know what I’ve done and you’re _happy -- ”_

“ _THIRTY_ PALTRY-ASS SECONDS, TERECITA.”

“I need all of _five_ minutes, I need three, it’s not confirmed that -- ”

“I can’t,” you say, “do this shit without you.”

Your partner makes advance. At the last you think she might sheath her sword in your ribs, so foaming with agony and rage is the girl. You stand there with Karkat’s thready pusher beating into your back and you don’t flinch, don’t move. Her hands do the murder tremble they did with the squealing Pekeio. Then she does shit she never did with you, not before, not ever: falls into your arms with a low noise. A despair sound. Halfway sob, halfway swear.

She breathes: “Mother _fucker.”_

You and she press in, your beloved burden still heavy wrapped around you. Your hand to her throatpipe. Her mitt softly to his arm, limp at your shoulder, red and flayed. You have to prop her up with yourself as you kiss each other to balance it out. Her mouth is communion and bile mixed: it always was. You don’t do it more than four seconds, but in those four seconds you are clamorous and bereft, you are strange and making surrender.

  


  
You don’t count the number of dead Mirthful to the dock shell. Takes two flights down, one silent sphincter ride to the bowels where the ships live, and then once you’re out the destruction of everyone alive you meet. You keep expecting to hear the klaxon wail your flight, but there is nothing but a silence that follows you wherever you go. _Echo Side_ holding its breath.

The painteds lounging around the entrance to the shipyard startle at you, and your church’s love for blood works in your favour. Terezi barks, “Where’s the shuttle _Shangri-La_ confiscated?” and one points, too bemused and not affrighted enough, and she says “Thanks!” before she skewers the clown in the chest. You toss the other one length of the hallway by the scruff, crushing his throat in the process before either of them can get their react on.

Then both of you hurry down between the lines of the ships. _Echo Side_ don’t keep full complement, but it has shuttles and outriggers, escape larva, storage containers stacked high and silent. The lights here glow sick and green.

“You know how to fly a motherfucking shuttle?”

“No! I’m a _law student!”_

“Then how -- ” 

“We will flip to see who gets to read the manual,” she says. “Then we fly as fast and as far as we can. We can use the autohelm, if needs be. We only need to run, not hide. The _Mindfang_ can hide for us when we get to it.”

You’re not sure of the shuttle, when you see it. It got the burn scars on it from traction jelly, wrestled into submission by the _Shangri-La_ before they pulled your boy off it. He now writhes unsettled and unconscious between your shoulderbones as Terezi screws around with the docking panel, picking buttons like at random before the rear hatch of the shuttle opens. She herds you inside first, then comes tumbling after as the hatch hydraulics wheeze closed. Inside is nothing special: a burnt-out, tiny troll mover of a vehicle. There’s yellow blood on the floor. There’s abandoned jackets, like someone got the hell out in a hurry.

Terezi seats herself down in the captain’s chair. She gives a low shudder of groan sound. She folds in on herself, just brief. Then she starts hooking her husktop into the protrusion jacks.

“I’m gonna make him comfortable,” you say, but she’s busied herself elsewhere.

You make him comfortable. There’s not much comfortable to make. In the alcove next to the pilot hutch you settle him down, bleeding and silent, unwrapping him from Terecita’s jacket like a present. He is all blood down his front. He is limp and helpless. You nearly die of motherfucking pain. With her sleeve you try to mop him some, but he is a fucking ruin. The wound at his socket tears right through the lid and has globbed up scarlet black with humour and lymph, swollen beyond recognize. It’s some gross-ass shit.

The lights in the shuttle blink to life. A couple screens pop up, read-outs and viewports of the sides, the front, the doors to _Echo Side’s_ dock. “Aha,” she says, and with no small bruise in her: “a homebrew autohelm. He thought of everything.”

“So can we hightail it out of here, girl, OR WHAT -- ”

“We can but try,” she says. You still keep in wait for the klaxon. For the alarm noise. There ain’t shit. “This will at least let me override, I just wish he didn’t code things to be so _user-unfriendly_. Where did they think they were going? To Vriska, or what? -- How is he?”

You rest your thumbs on Karkat’s pulse. Feel his pusher beating like someone trying to find a song they only half-know, all confused and subsiding. Lips wan and grey. Face ash blanch. He is so fucking beautiful you could die right here, just like this, if he died. “Blood’s up and staunching,” you say. “Blood’s not so bad. Couple broke-ass skeleton parts. HIS EYE JELLY IS FUCKED.” 

Your legislacerator is quiet, back to you in the chair. In the alcove you lean down and try to survey the damage, see what can be salvage. Your poor beloved won’t be squinting out his left eye no more. Your beloved will come out of this with pits and scars. You will learn to beg mercy for each. You will scourge yourself for each misplaced motherfucking cell.

The shuttle judders to life. In the chair, your girl is haloed by view feeds and nav feeds, head tilted up to them like she can see. There is a moment of puke-ass weightlessness as the ship engages and lifts itself up from the dock clamp, begins its passage away and out from Echo Side’s gravity pull.

Sprawled out before you, your beloved gives shudder. The sluggish blood from his eye gouge weeps afresh a little as he tries to open his eyes, and his one good one cracks open, shows you a crescent of yellow. The pupil rolls back in his head. He turns his cheek to the cool metal and coughs out nothing but a little froth, shoulders a-shudder with retch. All you can do is stroke him through it. Ease the woe. Touch him until he stops tremble, which is intimacy that kills.

“Shh,” you say, not even knowing the fuck how, not even knowing the way of it. “Shush, BEST FRIEND, you shush now.”

His flap opens, gives a little dry groan.

“Sollux,” he says.

“NOT SOLLUX ANY MORE. Don’t say a word -- don’t make a motherfucking utterance, you’re fine.”

Makes another sob, makes another noise a little like fuck. Then he slurs, “Where is she?” and you say, “PYROPE’S HERE TOO. Don’t pay it no motherfucking mind. Don’t try to speak.”

“No,” he says, restless, “where’s...”

Where you don’t know, because your moirail’s pupil rolls back up again. The lid shutters down. Spittle foams at his mouth whitely and softly, and you wipe it off but you don’t like it none. “Shit,” you say, “mother fuck -- _GIRL,_ come here, the fuck do I do.” No noise from the chair. “Terezi. Shit, COME ON -- ”

“YOU KNOW NOT WHAT YOU **MOTHERFUCKING _DO_** ,” says Terezi.

In the chair, your partner’s turned around. She is watching you. Her hands are calm folded in her lap. But her eyes have gone from scarlet to purple, indigo as mayhem, bright as paint. They luminesce like shit that glows in the dark.

There is none of your girl, squinting out of those lenses. An echo of her is in the voicebox, but otherwise the voice refracts out in a dozen different layers of voice. All of that layer is your old man. The shadows huddle away from her in each part of the shuttle, scuttling into corners and under bulkheads. The chucklevoodoo miasma comes off her in a kind of heat. A waver. Hesitancy in the air. Fear makes the air so cold that your breath comes out like a wet white huff, and hers don’t come out at all, she does not breathe.

The Grand Highblood watches you with your partner’s eyes, wears your partner’s skin. The rest of her is weird and slack. You knew he’d put some shit inside her nug, just hadn’t expected it had been _him._

He continues: “You’re not betraying me, child. IT IS NOT ME YOU BETRAY. You betray the future. You ransack it and sell it for scrap. YOU TAKE A STEAMING DUMP ON EVERYTHING WE EVER STROVE FOR, FLESH OF MY FLESH AND BLOOD OF MY BLOOD, you sell your hatchright -- for -- **_WHAT?”_**

Your arm’s over Karkat. Your body’s placed as shield. Though the shell of your girl don’t move in the pilot’s chair, you make yourself go between him and her. 

“You don’t understand,” you say, and you know it’s lame before it exits your flap.

“I UNDERSTAND PERFECTLY, NINJA,” says the Grand Highblood. “I UNDERSTAND -- _**NEVER TRUST A FUCKING PYROPE.”**_

Huh. “That ain’t -- ”

“Their blood outs,” he says, and it’s strange in her lips, in her teeth. Her whistler curls in contempt. “THEIR BLOOD IS FETID TEAL BACKWASH THAT ONLY KNOWS WAYWARDNESS. No loyalty. Just law. JUST RULES, you understand? Come back, son, she don’t love you. SHE LOVES ONLY WHAT HER KIND LOVE, and that’s a great and terrible lie they call justice.”

“She -- ”

“Kill her and come back with him,” he says. “THAT’S YOUR MOTHERFUCKING HATCHRIGHT TOO. You love them and you bleed them for being faithless whores. YOU LOVE THEM AND YOU TEAR THEM ONCE THEY TURN ON YOU. I thought she was a different breed. I thought she could be taught. MORE FUCKING FOOL ME! All brain, no prayer. ALL SKULL, ALL SIN.

“Mother’s taint. TOO MUCH TEAL, GAMZEE, DO YOU GOT THE UNDERSTANDING OF ME? I let her go away from me and she found a new God to worship. I found him on her skin. I found him **_WRAPPED AROUND HER GROTTY LITTLE STEM._** Oh, child, it broke my pusher. I ASKED HER WHY SO SWEET AND SOFT, child. I asked and she said, THERE IS MORE HOLY IN THIS WORLD THAN CAN BE FOUND IN A CHURCH. More laws than your God gave. A cultist already, you understand.”

In the chair Terezi sucks in a breath that ought to rattle. Her lids come close like a bruise. Lashes brush cheek. Her oculars are lavender glow through the thin lid. “I knew what that pirate bitch could do,” says your ancestor, double-voiced, fluting. “I KNEW THE EXTENT OF THE PIRATE BITCH’S POWER. What did my lover think, walking into that court? Who did my sweetheart think had given order, that a high Imperial trial be populated **_WHOLLY BY DIRTBLOODS?_**

“Never love a lowblood, child. They don’t understand the word.”

  


  
Another long breath, another flutter of lid. “Latula,” says your ancestor, “Latula, why did you _motherfucking_ FORSAKE ME,” and then he’s still for a moment.

When you find your twitch, it says: “ _You_ killed the Neophyte?”

“Yes,” he says. “WITH OTHER HANDS I DESTROYED HER. With a felon I spilled her blood. But with my fingers I went and trashed her rad collection of dragon statues after, and I KILLED HER AND **I ALONE.** Don’t be lead astray, little Makara, and you come back to where you belong. I’LL FIND YOU A NEW RIGHT PAW AND SET YOU BACK ON TRACK WITHOUT RECRIMINATION, as long as you motherfucking get your ass back here.” 

For a moment you got to look at Karkat. His twitcher ain’t bit or anything and the foam doesn’t seem to be coming back, no seizure and no shake, so you guess you don’t have to do anything drastic. When you look back at your legislacerator you feel so much empty. If it was anger you’d know the how and why of it. You feel nothing, not blood on your skin nor paint on your mask.

“You fucked up,” you say.

Terezi’s face don’t change. “WHAT,” he says, flatly.

“You fucked up,” you say. “YOU SHOULD HAVE KILLED HIM WHEN YOU HAD THE CHANCE. Should have ended his life. I wouldn’t have been able to do shit then, you know? I would not have committed shit. She nor me would have been able to do fuck. You can’t even shoot us down because you motherfucking want him so bad, and you should shoot us down _RIGHT NOW.”_

“I have,” says the Grand Highblood, “LITTLE MOTHERFUCKING PATIENCE FOR RHETORIC, OR YOUR SHIT-ASS PRESUMPTION. You’re already too much like her. STOP TRYING TO BE SO FUCKING CLEVER.”

“I’ve loved this piece of Signless slurry,” you say, “since I was **_FIVE FUCKING SWEEPS OLD.”_**

There is no noise. No react. You say, “He’s my moirail -- he’s my mother fucking diamond, you get? IT WAS ME. He’s my moirallegiance and my own. THERE WAS SERENDIPITOUS SHIT GOING ON BETWEEN US BEFORE WE WERE DROPS IN A BUCKET. You get it? Messiahs wanted him and me as one.”

“Don’t,” he says softly, “mention Messiahs. Don’t breathe ‘em. DO NOT UTTER THEIR NAMES.”

“HE IS -- MY -- MOTHERFUCKING -- _MOIRAIL_ ,” you say. “So suck it, Dad.” 

The scream that comes out Terecita’s mouth is a loud scream. It is a noise of perfect frustration. Absolute despise. It is the sound of someone whose card hive just fell down. She screams so long and so loud that teal starts to trickle out her noseholes, makes a fat drip outside one of her shells, and that scream just keeps getting angrier and angrier and more impotent until she crumples like a twig. Like ash. Like an expended cigarette. The scream just stops and makes itself absent, and she’s left a used-up thing in the captain’s chair with blood on her face. 

Shadows recede. The temperature comes back slow, makes the air recycler rattle until the heat racks up to normal. You reach out for her before you know what’s what or can curse your hand for it. Terezi flinches back into the pillar, shuddering and broke, just a fucking wreck of a troll.

“Don’t,” she rasps. “Don’t touch me. Don’t let _anything_ touch me.”

There’s not much you can do for that except not to motherfucking touch her. Both you and she stare at each other, her blind to you and you kind of blind to her -- seeing her so hard that you don’t know what you’re looking at any more. You feel weak arms close up and around your ribs, feel your moirail grasp out for anything like a new-hatched animal.

You put your arm around him. Behind you, starlight blinks like a far-off carnival through the porthole. There’s nobody but the three of you in that shuttle, but there’s bloodstains right down to your motherfucking pusher. You put his bloody head close to your chest as close as you can get it, his horns right at your shoulders. Karkat chokes blood through his snort. You wrap yourself around him and you do not let go.

His fingers wrap around your arm, weak as weak can be. “I’ve got you,” you say. “I HAVE MOTHERFUCKING GOT YOU, you comprehend?”

For the first time, your best beloved breathes: “Gamzee?” all like music, like it’s being having song.

“Yeah,” you say. “Yeah, Karkat. It’s me, yo.”

In his lungs a breath rattles around, comes out sigh. Not the noise of someone safe. Not the noise of someone happy. Noise of someone who don’t know where the fuck he is any more, who or why he be. And yet he still -- after all this time, after no time at all -- wraps himself around you, frontpan on your shoulder. Holds _you,_ you motherfucking grub. After who you are, after all the shit you have perpetuated while being mad and loveblind. He sits in your arms used up, and your girl sits in the chair used up, and all of you lie like refuse.

  


  


You ain’t heir to shit.

  
  


  


**END OF ACT TWO**  


 

  



End file.
